Towards Industry 4.0: Gap Analysis between Current Automotive MES and Industry Standards Using Model-Based Requirement Engineering

The dawn of the fourth industrial revolution, Industry4.0 has created great enthusiasm among companies andresearchers by giving them an opportunity to pave the pathtowards the vision of a connected smart factory ecosystem. However, in context of automotive industry there is an evident gapbetween the requirements supported by the current automotivemanufacturing execution systems (MES) and the requirementsproposed by industrial standards from the International Societyof Automation (ISA) such as, ISA-95, ISA-88 over which theIndustry 4.0 is being built on. In this paper, we bridge this gapby following a model-based requirements engineering approachalong with a gap analysis process. Our work is mainly dividedinto three phases, (i) automotive MES tool selection phase, (ii) requirementsmodeling phase, (iii) and gap analysis phase based onthe modeled requirements. During the MES tool selection phase, we used known reliable sources such as, MES product surveyreports, white papers that provide in-depth and comprehensiveinformation about various comparison criteria and tool vendorslist for the current MES landscape. During the requirementmodeling phase, we specified requirements derived from theneeds of ISA-95 and ISA-88 industrial standards using the generalpurpose Systems Modeling Language (SysML). During thegap analysis phase, we find the misalignment between standardrequirements and the compliance of the existing software toolsto those standards.