A Device Gateway Service Architecture As a Business Process Integration Enabler in Industry Automation Environments”

“A Device Gateway Service Architecture as a Business Process Integration Enabler in Industry Automation Environments” Michael Glienecke, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) I declare that this thesis has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university and it is entirely my own work. I agree to deposit this thesis in the University’s open access institutional repository or allow the library to do so on my behalf, subject to Irish Copyright Legislation and Trinity College Library conditions of use and acknowledgement. Signed, 20.08.2018 Michael Glienecke i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing a PhD thesis is a challenging task which cannot be undertaken alone; it requires many people in various roles and contexts, whom I would like to thank sincerely. First of all, my deep gratitude goes to my PhD supervisor, Dr. Declan O’Sullivan, for his constant support in all ups and downs and especially his willingness to answer any kind of awkward question without hesitation and absolutely amazing responsiveness for such a busy person. His ability to keep me attached to the thesis and his willingness to accept my more than erratic work schedule due to my professional work in parallel were of paramount importance. Next, my work colleagues and customers, who shared emotionally and supportive the final stages of the thesis in the last two years with lots of willingness to adjust deadlines, deliverables and provide as much of leeway for writing as possible. Among them would be Dr. Jürgen Hoffmann for his emotional support and especially Heike Rudolph, Derk Kob and Robert Mayrhofer (all from Daimler AG) for providing valuable feedback, discuss and review ideas, visions and critical parts of the technology. With their consent many design ideas and issues could be tested in real-world environments and thus create a much stronger argument. Finally, my beloved wife Urzula, without her the whole project would never have taken off and who supported me in the bleakest moments when nothing seemed to progress anymore. Her willingness to accept any further direction, even a total stop of the thesis, as well as providing the necessary time for me to write, was paramount in the final achievement of fulfilling the thesis. ii SUMMARY Device gateways as a means of being an abstraction or transparency layer between devices and applications are in use already for a long time in the industry automation area to convert data formats, signals and messages from the physical world of the devices (including PLCs1 and sensors as data endpoints) to the logical world of the consuming application. However, modern business processes need further value-added services from device gateways to enable an efficient integration of these data endpoints2. Devices have to become active participants in the overall business process for enabling the process to adapt to rapidly changing business environments. In addition, semantically enriched data has to be provided, so that consumers can make better decisions based on these. These demands (among others) are cornerstones for the “future of production” 3 as well as part of the larger blueprint of “Industry 4.0”4. In this thesis a new architecture for device gateways, which enables the business process integration of devices and sensors as active participants, and the provisioning of additional value-added services and semantically enriched data, is discussed and a reference implementation provided. After investigation of the current methods of device business process integration (as state-of- the-art analysis) and solutions taken by other device gateway architectures, specific requirements for a new device gateway architecture were defined and discussed in this thesis. Based on these requirements, especially considering the enabling and optimization of the integration of devices into business processes, specific characteristic for the architecture were defined. Based on these requirements and characteristic the design was created and a reference implementation implemented to provide a working solution as well as a test-bed for case studies and experiments. The evaluation of the design was done with several experiments and two specific case studies, where real-world use cases were implemented using the proposed architecture and Microsoft Azure IoT as an alternative implementation with a comparison and discussion of the results. 1 PLC = Programmable Logic Controller. It is used to control machines in the industry automation area 2 Abele, Eberhard, und Gunther Reinhart. Zukunft der Produktion. Hanser München, 2011. 3 ibid 4 Vogel-Heuser, Birgit, et al. Handbuch Industrie 4.0 2nd Ed Bd.2: Automatisierung (VDI Springer Reference). Springer Vieweg, 2017 iii Table of content 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Motivation ................................................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Why is this research important? ........................................................................................................ 3 1.3 Research question ................................................................................................................................... 5 1.4 Research approach .................................................................................................................................. 5 1.5 The reference implementation ........................................................................................................... 6 1.6 What is not covered in the thesis ...................................................................................................... 6 1.7 Overview of the thesis ............................................................................................................................ 7 2 Background on Industry automation, production environment, Industry 4.0, integrating devices and their sensors into business processes ....................................................................................... 9 2.1 Devices, sensors, actuators and consumers .................................................................................. 9 2.2 Industry Automation ............................................................................................................................10 2.2.1 Communication protocols in industry automation ........................................................10 2.2.2 The typical production (or industry automation) environment ..............................11 2.3 Industry 4.0 ..............................................................................................................................................12 2.3.1 State of practice regarding industry automation and Industry 4.0 .........................12 2.3.2 Industry Automation and adoption rates of IT innovation .........................................13 2.3.3 IoT and Industry 4.0 ....................................................................................................................14 2.4 The place of device gateways in automation and Industry 4.0 ...........................................14 2.4.1 Future trends of device gateways .........................................................................................16 2.4.2 Direct integration of devices....................................................................................................16 2.5 Real-world integration example in a corrosion quality control lab ..................................16 2.5.1 Business process interests and requirements .................................................................19 2.5.2 Internal requirements ................................................................................................................20 2.6 State of the art in device gateway architectures .......................................................................21 2.6.1 Overview of existing device gateway architectures .......................................................21 2.6.2 Gateway architecture feature comparison ........................................................................31 2.6.3 Data protocol support ................................................................................................................36 2.7 Discussion .................................................................................................................................................39 iv 3 Requirements and characteristics of a device gateway architecture ........................................ 41 3.1 Usage scenarios of the architecture ............................................................................................... 41 3.1.1 Corrosion lab scenario simulation ........................................................................................ 42 3.1.2 Exhibition visitor congestion display system scenario simulation ......................... 44 3.2 Standard use cases to be supported by a gateway architecture ........................................ 46 3.3 Requirements to be supported by a device gateway architecture ................................... 46 3.3.1 Functional requirements for device gateway architectures ...................................... 47 3.3.2 Non-Functional requirements for device gateway architectures ............................ 48 3.4 Requirements rating ...........................................................................................................................

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