Holistic approach to the integration of existing production systems in Industry 4.0 environments

Abstract
This paper presents an approach to how existing production systems that are not Industry 4.0-ready can be expanded to participate in an Industry 4.0 factory. Within this paper, a concept is presented how production systems can be discovered and included into an Industry 4.0 (I4.0) environment, even though they did not have I4.0-interfaces when they have been manufactured. The concept is based on a communication gateway and an information server. Besides the concept itself, this paper presents a validation that demonstrates applicability of the developed concept.