IT/OT Integration by Design
Abstract
The four Industry 4.0 design principles information transparency, technical assistance, interconnection, and decentralized decisions pose challenges in integrating information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) solutions in industrial systems. These different solutions have conflicting requirements, making interfaces between them problematic for both systems and organizations. An Industrial Business Process Twin (IBPT) entity, acting as an intermediary between the realms of IT and OT, has been proposed in a previous work, to effectively reduce the amount of required IT/OT interfaces in an attempt of overcoming this situation. In this work, we investigate the effects of this approach during the design phase. We argue that, by eliminating potentially conflicting direct interfaces between IT and OT stakeholders within the organizational structure, this approach effectively eliminates conflicting communication channels within the system design. In order to verify our argument, we develop a model of our IBPT concept according to the Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) using an Industry 4.0 scenario addressing the four essential Industry 4.0 design principles. Results show that the IBPT approach indeed eliminates potentially conflicting IT/OT interfaces during the system design phase.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2305.19735,
title = {IT/OT Integration by Design},
author = {Georg Schäfer and Hannes Waclawek and Sarah Riedmann and Christoph Binder and Christian Neureiter and Stefan Huber},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.19735},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
Accepted at INCOSE IS2024. Important note: In the revised version presented at the conference, our main argument is grounded in Conway's law. In this preprint, we relied on its 'inverse', which lacks sufficient evidence in the literature. Please refer to the official conference version for our updated argumentation