Architectural approach for Autonomous 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 era where the digital and physical world work together. The implementation and use of systems based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in conjunction with the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyberphysical systems (CPS) have been extended during the last decades in numerous scenarios in industry and other domains. However, some of the major barriers to this approach are the lack of interoperability and the amount of engineering effort required for their integration. The research presented in this thesis targets issues related to digitalization and automation. It is framed by the Industry 4.0 paradigm, which promotes the rise of efficiency and sustainability on industrial production. The interoperability between heterogeneous systems and different domains is one of the main challenges of Industry 4.0. The quest for solutions that help to increase interoperability is an important part of this research. 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 IoT field, taking into account resource-constrained devices, system of systems integration, and data models. A detailed investigation of various interoperability mismatch problems is presented in this thesis. The proposed solution is an adapter system that can aid in the generation of new service consumer interfaces at both compile-time and run-time. The proposed approach requires a new point of view in the service description field that can provide a holistic description of the information required for the generation of consumer interfaces.In addition, aspects related to interoperability, such as the multiple IoT frameworks in the current market, naming conventions, syntactic modeling and translation, and security, are also partially analyzed. On a separate track, service composition in resource-constrained devices is analyzed in terms of latency, using the orchestration provided by the Arrowhead Framework.