Autonomous Runtime System of Systems Interoperability

Abstract: The current technological environment is evolving increasingly fast, and the development of new devices, technologies, and architectures has opened an emergent paradigm where the digital and physical world work together, leading to a new digitalizacion era.For the industry, the shift of paradigm represents the start of the fourth industrial revolution, also called Industry 4.0. The Industry 4.0 approach contributes to addressing continuously evolving industrial requirements, and promotes the rise of efficiency and sustainability on industrial production. The implementation and use of systems based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in conjunction with the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) into System of Systems (SoS) have been extended during the last decades in numerous scenarios contributing to reach the Industry 4.0 vision.The new industrial paradigm leads to growing complexity, thus, potentially increasing the development and maintenance costs. Significant engineering time is dedicated to the integration and interoperability of different components. Therefore, one of the major barriers to this approach is the lack of interoperability between heterogeneous systems.This thesis proposes a set of architectural design principles and tools in order to reduce engineering effort by means of finding solutions that enable autonomous integration and increase interoperability without human intervention. The research is focused on the SoS field, taking service definition and SoS integration into account.The presented solution is an service contract translation system that can aid in the generation of new service consumer interfaces at both compile time and runtime. The proposed approach requires a new point of view in the service contract that can provide a holistic description of the information required for the generation of consumer interfaces. The proposed system makes use of service interface descriptions to dynamically instantiate a new autonomously generated interface that solves communication mismatches between the provider and the consumer. To illustrate the potential of this approach, a prototype of the system has been implemented and testedIn addition, aspects related to interoperability, such as the many IoT frameworks in the current market, naming conventions, syntactic modeling and translation, and security, are also partially analyzed.