Leveraging Industry Standards and Model-Driven Engineering Techniques for Vertical Integration in Smart Manufacturing Environments

Smart manufacturing requires deeply integrated IT systems in order to foster flexibility in the setup, re-arrangement and use of attached physical manufacturing systems. In a vertical integration scenario, IT systems of different vendors might be in use and proprietary interfaces need to defined in order to allow the exchange of relevant information from one system to another. A model-driven approach for vertical integration of IT systems is proposed in this work. It is based on the application of industry standards for the representation of hierarchy level specific system properties and an alignment of their key concepts in order to provide bridging functions (transformations) for the conversion of data between the different systems.