An event-driven integrative framework enabling information notification among manufacturing resources

Industry 4.0 paradigm envisions a new generation of collaborative manufacturing system where all the components are connected exploiting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) protocol. Through this pervasive connection, sensors, machines, robots and other production equipment can communicate and share information with their surroundings resources. In order to contribute to realise such a vision, this paper introduces an event-driven framework that enables the interaction of heterogeneous distributed resources, according to the principles of Industry 4.0 paradigm. The overall aim of this research is providing new mechanisms to notify significant information produced within the factory towards enabled and interested production resources. In particular, combining various technologies such as IIoT, Semantic Web, and Multi-Agent based systems, the proposed framework allows the resources to be updated about changes occurred in their context. Under these conditions, the framework can be exploited in all the scenarios where the cooperation among resources is a strict requirement, thus contributing to support various ad-hoc services that drive modern factories towards a more sustainable, efficient, and competitive manufacturing system. Moreover, the validity of the framework is demonstrated leveraging the implementation of its instance within a real case study.