Ubiquitous System Integration as a Service in Smart Factories

The state-of-the-art in manufacturing technology identifies a data rich, horizontally and vertically integrated environment, with collaborative control and intelligence systems, to enable what is called a smart factory. Similar to digital factories, smart factories signify a greater digital convergence between manufacturing Operational Technology (OT), and wider enterprise Integrated Technology (IT). With these new capabilities comes new challenges in scale, complexity, and the skills needed to enable ubiquitous system integration. While in the past, engineers have utilized a variety of proprietary graphical configuration and programming tools to intuitively create simple to complex manufacturing systems, presently, the standard technology ecosystem which engineers design, control, and maintain, is observably expanding, and/or evolving to incorporate more open-source technologies, network services, and distributed devices. Therefore, this paper will examine the emerging next generation technologies and tools which will support engineers in designing and interacting with the new digital manufacturing ecosystem in smart factories. To achieve this: a state-of-the-art survey of commercial Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology is presented; three key ubiquitous technology trends are examined; and a use-case is presented with a universal framework. Uniquely, this framework demonstrates the collective capabilities of the technologies to overcome ubiquitous system integration problems.