Industry 4.0 as a Cyber-Physical System study

Advances in computation and communication are taking shape in the form of the Internet of Things, Machine-to-Machine technology, Industry 4.0, and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). The impact on engineering such systems is a new technical systems paradigm based on ensembles of collaborating embedded software systems. To successfully facilitate this paradigm, multiple needs can be identified along three axes: (i) online configuring an ensemble of systems, (ii) achieving a concerted function of collaborating systems, and (iii) providing the enabling infrastructure. This work focuses on the collaborative function dimension and presents a set of concrete examples of CPS challenges. The examples are illustrated based on a pick and place machine that solves a distributed version of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. The system includes a physical environment, a wireless network, concurrent computing resources, and computational functionality such as, service arbitration, various forms of control, and processing of streaming video. The pick and place machine is of medium-size complexity. It is representative of issues occurring in industrial systems that are coming online. The entire study is provided at a computational model level, with the intent to contribute to the model-based research agenda in terms of design methods and implementation technologies necessary to make the next generation systems a reality.