Dynamic management of cloud- and fog-based resources for cyber-physical production systems with a realistic validation architecture and results

In cloud-based cyber-physical production systems, classic automation technologies are biased by the latest developments in information technology. This leads to new challenges in terms of complexity, fragility and reliability, as a production system has much less tolerance for errors and failures than conventional systems in information technology. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of a method for the dynamic management of service resources and to propose a new, appropriate validation architecture for the described method. The method consists of an unified, formalized system description of the field, fog/edge- and cloud-based resources of a cyber-physical production system, a multi-criteria evaluation metric and two algorithmic approaches to optimize the resource configuration. The lifelike validation architecture is described in structure and workflow and is used for result verification. Different case studies can be validated with the used lab-scale test-bed. The qualitative and quantitative results show how the reliability of such systems can be increased with dynamic resource management compared to the static case.