An architecture based on RAMI 4.0 to discover equipment to process operations required by products

Abstract The fourth industrial revolution, also called Industry 4.0, is a new industrial age that have been gaining force and new followers around the world. The Industry 4.0 can be understood as the implementation of the smart factory to provide smart products and services that meet the consumer individual needs. Given its increasing acceptance and repercussion, a reference architecture model for Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) was developed based on vertical integration, horizontal integration and end-to-end engineering. However, RAMI 4.0 initiative requires efforts in different aspects to reach the level of practical implementation. In this sense, this paper aims to present a layered architecture based on RAMI 4.0 to discover equipment to process operations according to the product requirements. The architecture must provide components for a communication between machines and products, and a service that offer a mechanism similar to the domain name system (DNS) to search the equipment to process the operation. In this architecture the equipment are storage in a structure organized hierarchically to assist the search service. The functionalities of the proposed architecture are conceptually modeled using production flow schema (PFS) and their dynamic behaviors are verified and validated by Petri net (PN) models. The architecture is applied in a modular production system to evaluate RAMI 4.0 as a guide for the development of architectures for Industry 4.0.