Product Line Engineering of Monitoring Functionality in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems: A Domain Analysis

In recent years, manufacturing technology is evolving and progressively becoming more dynamic and complex. This means that manufacturing technology (e.g., based on Industry 4.0) should be able to control the production process at runtime by monitoring physical elements and adapting itself. Such functionality is aimed at increasing production effectiveness and reducing the production cost. We argue that monitoring process can be viewed as a software product line having commonalities and variability. To support our argument, we analyzed and conducted domain analysis of two monitoring systems of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPSs) from two industrial domains including automated warehouses and press machines. Based on the domain analysis, we present a common solution for monitoring including a software product line. With such product line, a user can configure, monitor, and visualize data of an ICPS at runtime. However, such solution could not handle the dynamic functionality related to monitoring of ICPS. Thus, we propose the use of dynamic product line and present a set of research questions that must be addressed for such solution.