Industrial Internet: Towards Interoperability and Composability
1. OVERVIEW
According to a 2015 survey by IoT Nexus 26, 77 % of professionals surveyed believe that interoperability is the largest challenge facing the Industrial Internet. However,“ Interoperability”( enabling interactions through common interfaces based on common conceptual models and shared context) is only a first step toward meeting the need. In addition, what is required is“ Composability”: a shared understanding between components of their behavior – necessary if the promise of the industrial Internet of Things – ad hoc applications composed by end users – is to be realized. This article explores the requirements for a connected, interoperable environment in the age of the Industrial Internet. It then reviews the approaches that have been used in addressing similar problems in the consumer / commercial Internet, identifies the foundational concepts and unique challenges for these problems in the Industrial Internet, and suggests a roadmap toward realizing the interoperability and composability the Industrial Internet will require.
2. WHY INTEROPERABILITY
To begin, it is useful to distinguish different levels of general interoperability: integrability, interoperability and composability. In the early days of software systems, functions often had names like I307F3; the actual computation done by the function would have to be looked up in documentation, along with the proper arguments and result types. Without such documentation, such a function or the capability exposed by this function could not be integrated into a system except by their original authors, as there was no way to determine the correct way to call the function. Later, explicit types and function signatures such as:
( Add Integer1 Integer2)- > Integer
helped us determine the correct way to call the function and gave us an expectation of the type of the result, making such function integrable or having integrability. However, we still could mistake the meaning of‘ Add’ – it evokes a common mathematical function, but the author may have meant it as shorthand for something else, such as adding the two numbers to a stack and returning the number of items on the stack. The result is integrability without interoperability – we can successfully call the function and understand the type of the result, without sharing the conceptual model of what it is that the function does.
But even if we do have such a shared understanding, that Add will perform addition of two integers and give us the resulting integer, there may be additional assumptions that differ between the user and the author of the Add function. For instance, the user may think that any
26 http:// www. theinternetofthings. eu / victoria-lloyd-iot-nexus-77-iot-professionals-saw-interoperability-biggestchallenge-internet-things
IIC Journal of Innovation- 59-