Industrial Internet: Towards Interoperability and Composability
cannot take on the challenges in interoperability because we would lack even a common understanding of what the interacting components are in such a system.
The Industrial Internet Reference Architecture( IIRA) 34 published by the IIC 35 is a first step toward such a shared architecture. The key intent of the IIRA is to establish common understanding in major architectural issues, structures and requirements for the Industrial Internet across industrial sectors, from which to build consensus to drive product interoperability and simplify development. Two key elements in the IIRA are most relevant to the discussion concerning interoperability. The first one is the Industrial Internet Functional Domain, as shown in Figure 3, and the other is the concept of composability in the Industrial Internet. We will discuss the latter point first and come back to the Functional Domain.
Taking into account the unique requirements in the Industrial Internet, the IIRA proposes a simplified interoperability model for building an Industrial Internet system from its various components, in relation to the different levels of understanding in communications, as summarized in Table 1. This model reflects the learning from the existing models of interoperability in the Internet, IT domain, industrial sectors and academic research 36. In formulating this model, a reference to the human language model is made, anticipating that many of the Industrial Systems are increasingly designed to be more intelligent, mimicking human interaction patterns. Within an Industrial Internet system, the interactions among its components may be examined under this model to decide the required interoperability level. As Industrial Internet systems mature, more interactions are expected to move toward composability.
34 www. iiconsortium. org / IIRA. htm
35 www. iiconsortium. org
36 Most noticeably the excellent work done by the GridWise project
[ https:// www. smartgrid. gov / files / Framework _ for _ Addressing _ Interoperability _ Issues _ 200712. pdf, Ron Ambrosio ] and that by Page et al [ Page EH, Briggs R, Tufarolo JA. Toward a Family of Maturity Models for the Simulation Interconnection Problem. In: Proceedings of the Spring 2004 Simulation Interoperability Workshop, IEEE CS Press; 2004.].
IIC Journal of Innovation- 67-