A Reference Architecture for Digital Transformation of SMEs in the Manufacturing Domain

The Industry 4.0 paradigm has led to a revolution in the manufacturing domain, driving improvements in product quality, reducing time-to-market, and lowering environmental costs through digitization and advanced analytics. In spite of this, many Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face significant barriers in adopting such solutions that could assist them in the competition with their larger rivals, including limited resources, expertise, and access to cutting-edge software. Aiming to mitigate this gap and empower SMEs, the DiMAT framework is developed offering a number of open-source, scalable tools organized into three core Suites. This paper deals with the description of DiMAT's architecture, providing an in-depth view of its strong aspects. Beginning with a high-level overview of the architecture and then delving in more detail on each toolkit's structure, this article demonstrates the manner in which the toolkits are designed following state-of-the-art practices and how they can be deployed.