Dr.-Ing.

Kuhn, Thomas

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  • Publication
    Industry 4.0 reference architectures: State of the art and future trends
    ( 2021)
    Nakagawa, Elisa Yumi
    ;
    Antonino, Pablo Oliveira
    ;
    Schnicke, Frank
    ;
    Capilla, Rafael
    ;
    Kuhn, Thomas
    ;
    Liggesmeyer, Peter
    Industry 4.0 has led to a dramatic shift in manufacturing processes, which must be accomplished by interacting end-to-end industrial systems. While Industry 4.0 is still a big challenge for many manufacturing companies, reference architectures have been increasingly adopted in different domains to guide engineers on how their systems should interoperate and be structured. Companies have made different experiences with reference architectures for Industry 4.0. However, depending on the use cases addressed, a reference architecture may be more or less suited to support the transformation of a particular company. Besides, a complete understanding of existing representative architectures does not exist. The main goal of this work is to review existing reference architectures for Industry 4.0 and analyze them concerning their suitability for supporting Industry 4.0 processes and solutions. For this, we systematically researched these architectures and thoroughly analyzed and characterized them. We also address their use and technologies/tools that could support their implementation. As a result, we found that existing architectures still have a long way to go; hence, we present the most urgent steps for the near future. We conclude that the Industry 4.0 community is right in investing in reference architectures considering the future of Industry 4.0.
  • Publication
    Continuous Systems and Software Engineering for Industry 4.0: A disruptive view
    ( 2021)
    Nakagawa, Elisa Yumi
    ;
    Antonino, Pablo Oliveira
    ;
    Schnicke, Frank
    ;
    Kuhn, Thomas
    ;
    Liggesmeyer, Peter
    Context: Industry 4.0 has substantially changed the manufacturing processes, leading to smart factories with full digitalization, intelligence, and dynamic production. The need for rigorous and continuous development of highly networked software-intensive Industry 4.0 systems entails great challenges. Hence, Industry 4.0 requires new ways to develop, operate, and evolve these systems accordingly. Objective: We introduce the view of Continuous Systems and Software Engineering for Industry 4.0 (CSSE I4.0). Method: Based on our research and industrial projects, we propose this novel view and its core elements, including continuous twinning, which is also introduced first in this paper. We also discuss the existing industrial engagement and research that could leverage this view for practical application. Results: There are still several open issues, so we highlight the most urgent perspectives for future work. Conclusions: A disruptive view on how to engineer Industry 4.0 systems must be established to pave the way for the realization of the fourth industrial revolution.
  • Publication
    Architecture Blueprint Enabling Distributed Digital Twins
    ( 2021)
    Schnicke, Frank
    ;
    Espen, Daniel
    ;
    Antonino, Pablo Oliveira
    ;
    Kuhn, Thomas
    Mass production today is optimized for large lot sizes, and changes to industrial production lines are effort-intense, time-consuming, and costly. The fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 (I4.0), aims at reducing the effort needed for changes in industrial production lines. The key benefits of next-generation manufacturing systems are less downtimes and the production of small lot sizes down to lot size 1. I4.0 does not introduce a silver bullet technology, but requires a transformation of the system architecture of production systems. In the literature, however, there systematic guidance for designing manufacturing systems that address central I4.0 use cases like plug'n'produce and end-to-end communication is still missing, as are details on the infrastructure needed to enable I4.0 technologies such as Digital Twins. To contribute to filling this gap, this paper presents (i) a Digital Twin architecture blueprint driven by central I4.0 use cases and (ii) a prototypical open-source implementation of the architecture using the concept of the Asset Administration Shell.
  • Publication
    Enabling Industry 4.0 Service-Oriented Architecture through Digital Twins
    ( 2020)
    Schnicke, Frank
    ;
    Kuhn, Thomas
    ;
    Antonino, Pablo Oliveira
    A major goal of Industry 4.0 is to increase changeability of production processes, and to reduce the additional cost for individualized products. A service oriented production architecture can enable this goal. However, it demands changes in the software-based systems that compose the different levels of automation in a factory. Additionally, it requires a multitude of data to reflect the demands of service-oriented manufacturing processes. In this paper, we detail the minimal data to be contained in digital twins to enable an Industry 4.0 service-oriented architecture. We use two central Industry 4.0 use cases as drivers for deriving this data. We describe services by detailing their capabilities and their quality of service in terms of time, money and resulting product quality. Using these descriptions, we detail customer's order and the included product to be manufactured. Additionally, we describe challenges of the orchestration process like incompleteness of business processes and detail, how they can be solved using digital twins of the product, the service providers and the plant. Finally, we validate the proposed models by implementing the use cases on two model plants and give an experience report.
  • Publication
    Service-Based Architectures in Production Systems: Challenges, Solutions & Experiences
    ( 2020)
    Kuhn, Thomas
    ;
    Schnicke, Frank
    ;
    Antonino, Pablo Oliveira
    The automation industry is undergoing many changes. The fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0) is the answer to changing markets and increasing quality requirements. Customers demand individualized products and smaller lot sizes. This requires the end-to-end digitalization of manufacturing processes and raises the need for system architectures for next-generation automation systems. Within the context of the national reference project BaSys 4, we researched a service-based architecture for the automation domain and integrated it with ongoing standardization activities. Service-oriented Architecture (SoA) is a proven architecture pattern from the domain of IT systems. It propagates reusable services that are orchestrated to create scalable applications. Our SoA is based on the concept of asset administration shells that realize digital twins, which are digital representations of production assets with unified interfaces that enable access to asset services and data. We explain and discuss realization concepts for digital twins, and illustrate our experiences with the transfer of the service-based architecture principle to the automation industry within the context of selected Industrie 4.0 use cases. We highlight solution approaches for the efficient realization of lot size 1 production as well as for creating digital twins of production assets, and discuss levels of Industrie 4.0 maturity.
  • Publication
    Blueprints for architecture drivers and architecture solutions for Industry 4.0 shopfloor applications
    ( 2019)
    Antonino, Pablo Oliveira
    ;
    Schnicke, Frank
    ;
    Zhang, Zai
    ;
    Kuhn, Thomas
    Industry 4.0 aims at evolving the current industrial processes towards directly connecting shopfloor machines to systems from different layers of the automation pyramid, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). There are key functional and quality requirements that apply to most Industry 4.0 systems independent of the application domain, e.g., requirements related to interoperability, recoverability, security, and modifiability. Despite their importance, there is still a lack of understanding of (i) architecture drivers that focus on these quality aspects and (ii) architecture solutions for these architecture drivers that are adequate for a wide range of Industry 4.0 contexts. To contribute to filling this gap, we present in this paper (i) quality-centered architecture drivers derived from industrial cases, and (ii) architecture solutions based on the concepts of Digital Twins, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Virtual Automation Bus for four recurrent production plant scenarios. The architecture drivers and solutions presented in this paper were instantiated in different Industry 4.0 contexts, such as BaSys 4.0 (the German national reference project for Industry 4.0), and by the BaSys industry project partners.
  • Publication
    Towards Runtime Monitoring for Malicious Behaviors Detection in Smart Ecosystems
    ( 2019)
    Cioroaica, Emilia
    ;
    Giandomenico, Felicita Di
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    Kuhn, Thomas
    ;
    Lonetti, Francesca
    ;
    Marchetti, Eda
    ;
    Jahic, Jasmin
    ;
    Schnicke, Frank
    Smart Ecosystem reflects in the control decisions of entities of different nature, especially of its software components. Particularly, the malicious behavior requires a more accurate attention. This paper discusses the challenges related to the evaluation of software smart agents and proposes a first solution leveraging the monitoring facilities for a) assuring conformity between the software agent and its digital twin in a real-time evaluation and b) validating decisions of the digital twins during runtime in a predictive simulation.
  • Publication
    Speculative Temporal Decoupling Using fork ()
    ( 2019)
    Jung, Matthias
    ;
    Schnicke, Frank
    ;
    Damm, Markus
    ;
    Kuhn, Thomas
    ;
    Wehn, Norbert
    Temporal decoupling is a state-of-the-art method to speed up virtual prototypes. In this technique, a process is allowed to run ahead of simulation time for a specific interval called quantum. By using this method, the number of synchronization points, i.e. context switches, in the simulator is reduced and therefore, the simulation speed can be increased significantly. However, using this approach can introduce functional simulation errors due to missed synchronization events. Thus, using temporal decoupling implies a trade-off between speed and accuracy and the size of the quantum must be chosen wisely with respect to the simulated application. In loosely timed simulations most of the functional errors are tolerable for the sake of simulation speed. However, for instance safety critical errors are rare but can lead to fatal results and must be handled carefully. Prior works present mechanisms based on checkpoints (storing/restoring the internal state of the simulation model) in order to rollback in simulation time and correct the occurred errors by forcing synchronization. However, checkpointing approaches are intrusive and require changes to both the source code of all the used simulation models and the kernel of the simulator. In this paper we present a non-intrusive rollback approach for error-free temporal decoupling, which allows the usage of closed source models by using Unix's fork() system call. Furthermore, we provide a case study based on the IEEE simulation standard SystemC.