Cyber-Physical Microservices: An IoT-based Framework for Manufacturing Systems

Recent advances in ICT enable the evolution of the manufacturing industry to meet the new requirements of the society. Cyber-physical systems, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and Cloud computing, play a key role in the fourth industrial revolution known as Industry 4.0. The microservice architecture has evolved as an alternative to SOA and promises to address many of the challenges in software development. In this paper, we adopt the concept of microservice and describe a framework for manufacturing systems that has the cyber-physical microservice as the key construct. The manufacturing plant processes are defined as orchestrations of primitive cyberphysical microservices performed by the physical plant layer. Model-driven engineering is utilized to semi-automate the development process for the industrial engineer, who is not familiar with microservices; IoT technologies are used for their integration. A case study demonstrates the feasibility of the