Semantic Interoperability in Industry 4.0: Survey of Recent Developments and Outlook

Semantic interoperability is the ability of systems to exchange information with unambiguous meaning. This is an outstanding challenge in the development of Industry 4.0 due to the trend towards dynamic re-configurable production processes with increasingly complex automation systems and a diversity of standards, components, tools and services. The cost of making systems interoperable is a major limiting factor in the adoption of new technology and the envisioned development of production industry. Therefore, methods and concepts enabling efficient interoperation of heterogeneous systems are investigated to understand how the interoperability problem should be addressed. To support this development, we survey the literature on interoperability to identify automation approaches that address semantic interoperability, in particular in dynamic cyber-physical systems at large scale. We find that different aspects of the interoperability problem are investigated, some based on a conventional bottom-up standardization approach, while others consider a goal-driven computational approach; and that the different directions explored are related to open questions that motivates further research. We argue that a goal-driven machine learning approach to semantic interoperability can result in solutions that are applicable across standardization domains and thus is a promising direction of research in this era of the industrial internet of things.