A Distributed Registry of Multi-perspective Data Services in Cyber Physical Production Networks

The advances in smart technologies, such as sensor networks, cloud computing, data management and artificial intelligence, enable production systems to communicate with each other and rapidly configure themselves to meet dynamic production needs. In this context, the adoption of service-oriented computing is aimed at enabling modular and standardised software infrastructures, platform-independent interactions between software components and information hiding for ensuring data sovereignty in a fully distributed environment. However, for a full-fledged exploitation of service-oriented computing capabilities in the Industry 4.0 production systems, the existing service design solutions still lack a clear specification of what is the data which the service relies on, what is the business goal of the service and when it is invoked within the information flow throughout the production network. In this paper, we propose the model of a registry of data-oriented services in an industrial production chain. The organisation of services in the registry is guided by multiple aspects of the production network, namely: (i) the business goal of a real production network (ii) the perspective on production data that is managed through the service (iii) the high level action performed by the service The modelling strategy has been conceived to properly guide service design against ad-hoc solutions, thus facilitating future service selection and composition to meet the business goals of collaborating actors. The resulting portfolio of services can be declined by each actor of the production network, leading to a distributed registry that allows each actor to preserve control over the owned data. The application in a case study has been performed to demonstrate the feasibility of the data-oriented services.