Organizing Self-Organizing Systems: A Terminology, Taxonomy, and Reference Model for Entities in Cyber-physical Production Systems

Ongoing digitalization accelerates the transformation and integration of physical production and traditional computing systems into smart objects and their interconnectivity, forming the Internet of Things. In manufacturing, the cross-linking of embedded systems creates adaptive and self-organizing Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs). Owing to ever-increasing cross-linking, rapid technological advances, and multifunctionality, the complexity and structural opacity of CPPSs are rapidly increasing. The development of urgently needed modeling approaches for managing such complexity and structural opacity, however, is impeded by a lack of common understanding of CPPSs. Therefore, in this paper, we contribute to a common understanding of CPPSs by defining and classifying CPPS entities and illustrating their relations. More precisely, we present a terminology, a taxonomy, and a reference model for CPPS entities, created and evaluated using an iterative development process. Thereby, we lay the foundation for future CPPS modeling approaches that make CPPS complexity and structural opacity more manageable.