Design of Smart Factory Web Services Based on the Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is cited as the latest means for making manufacturing more flexible, cost effective, and responsive to changes in customer demands. However, a major concern surrounding the IIoT is interoperability between devices and machines that function within different protocols and architectures. This paper presents the Smart Factory Web (SFW), which is based on the IIoT concept of improving factory-to-factory interoperability. The proposed SFW enables secure data and service integration in cross-site application scenarios as well as ‘plug & work’ functions for devices, machines, and data analytics software by applying industrial standards, Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA), and Automation Markup Language (AutomationML). To reach the goal, experimental factories that have heterogeneous manufacturing infrastructures are linked and the SFW is implemented in four phases. The usage scenario, called order-driven adaptive production, used to align capacity across factories, will also be validated in the real deployment.