Service and Agent based System Architectures for Industrie 4.0 Systems

Industrie 4.0 is based on three pillars: Vertical Integration, Horizontal Integration and Consistency of Engineering over Product Life Cycle. The implementation of systems to realize these pillars requires an architecture enabling interoperability of distributed components and their digital representations. Potential middleware concepts for an architecture are the service-oriented architectures OPC UA, JADEX/JADEX and Arrowhead. A holistic and modular I4.0 architecture using agent technology to implement Digital Twins and thereby decouples communication middleware from processes and hardware is proposed. © 2020 IEEE.