Self-organizing Service Structures for Cyber-physical Control Models with Applications in Dynamic Factory Automation - A Fog/Edge-based Solution Pattern Towards Service-Oriented Process Automation

The convergence of information technology and operational technology is a strong force in fabric automation. Service-oriented architectures and cloud computing technologies expand into next generation production systems. Those technologies enable a lot of new possibilities; such as high agility, global connectivity and high computing capacities. However, they also bring huge challenges regarding flexibility and reliability through increasing system dynamics, complexity and heterogenity. New solution patterns are needed to conquer those challenges. This paper proposes a new fog-oriented approach, which shows how future production systems, that are often called cyber-physical production systems, can deal with dynamically changing services and infrastructure elements. The goal is to provide an adequate degree of flexibility and reliability across the whole production lifecycle. Therefore, an event property model (“bubble model”), a multi-criterial evaluation metric and extensions to Kuhn-Munkres and Add algorithm are described. The overall concept is evaluated by an application example from the field of process engineering. With the help of practical case studies and dynamic system simulations, qualitative results are gained.