A Device Gateway Service Architecture as a Business Process Integration Enabler in Industry Automation Environments

Abstract

Device gateways as a means of being an abstraction or transparency layer between devices and applications are in use already for a long time in the industry automation area to convert data formats, signals and messages from the physical world of the devices (including PLCs and sensors as data endpoints) to the logical world of the consuming application. However, modern business processes need further value-added services from device gateways to enable an efficient integration of these data endpoints. Devices have to become active participants in the overall business process for enabling the process to adapt to rapidly changing business environments. In addition, semantically enriched data has to be provided, so that consumers can make better decisions based on these. These demands (among others) are cornerstones for the ?future of production? as well as part of the larger blueprint of ?Industry 4.0?.

In this thesis a new architecture for device gateways, which enables the business process integration of devices and sensors as active participants, and the provisioning of additional value-added services and semantically enriched data, is discussed and a reference implementation provided.

After investigation of the current methods of device business process integration (as state-of-the-art analysis) and solutions taken by other device gateway architectures, specific requirements for a new device gateway architecture were defined and discussed in this thesis. Based on these requirements, especially considering the enabling and optimization of the integration of devices into business processes, specific characteristic for the architecture were defined. Based on these requirements and characteristic the design was created and a reference implementation implemented to provide a working solution as well as a test-bed for case studies and experiments.

The evaluation of the design was done with several experiments and two specific case studies, where real-world use cases were implemented using the proposed architecture and Microsoft Azure IoT as an alternative implementation with a comparison and discussion of the results.