Industrial Internet: Towards Interoperability and Composability
operational metaknowledge27 that future automated systems will need to reason over; e.g., to
determine the reliability of a subsystem, or a service outcome.
As we will discuss here, the good news is that while such metaknowledge might be generated
manually at some expense and trouble, it need not be: We envision systems of the near future
being able to create such metaknowledge based on observing their own operations and then
having the ability to share that knowledge over the Industrial Internet with other peer systems
with similar compositions and environments.
3.
INTEROPERABILITY IN THE CONTEXT OF THE INDUSTRIAL INTERNET
The idea of the Industrial Internet is in a large part inspired by the consumer or commercial
Internet. Additionally, the Industrial Internet may also be considered as a convergence of
Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT). Therefore, it may be informative
to take a brief review of the concept and practices of interoperability in the Internet and IT and
to use that as a baseline to highlight the unique requirements and challenges in interoperability
faced by the Industrial Internet.
The consideration of interoperability in the Internet and IT has been mainly focused on
communication and information sharing between connected systems; e.g., among the client
applications and browsers, the web and application servers and the databases across all the
application and communication layers to make them work together. As IT systems undertake
solving more complex problems, their applications become more complex as well. A task (e.g.,
order processing) usually requires concerted interactions of a number of subsystems (production,
supply-chain, finance, delivery, customer-relation, etc.), each of which is a typically specialized
system made by a different vendor. In these cases, interoperability focuses on how to ensure
different systems or subsystems interact seamlessly to complete a large task.
Conventionally, there are two major approaches for achieving interoperability to enable
communication or interaction between heterogeneous systems: 1) through the mediation of
brokers and 2) through a common meta-model with agreed interfaces, as depicted in Figure 1.
27
Metaknowledge: knowledge about our knowledge – how reliable it is, the provenance of the information,
collectively referred to as epistemology – how we justify our beliefs of what we think is true.
IIC Journal of Innovation
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