INTELLIGENT AND SELF-ADAPTING INTEGRATION BETWEEN MACHINES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Increasing automation in the manufacturing industry requires a comprehensive integration of machines and business information systems. Driven by the Internet of Things or the high-tech strategy Industry 4.0, an efficient integration plays in this domain an increasing role. Despite powerful technologies, the integration is a challenging and labor-intensive task. To walk with the development, machines and information systems need flexible and powerful integration mechanisms with self-configuring and self-adapting features. The ideal conception would be a plug & produce mechanism, which follows the USB plug & play principle. In this paper, we address this problem and present a novel approach for a structured, automated and reusable integration of information systems and machines. The approach is realized as a framework which allows the development of transformations between different data schemas. Accordingly, the framework is positioned between machine and application layer. The framework consists of a declarative mapping language with a graphical notation and an intelligent solution for connecting different systems. In this contribution, we give an overview of the framework components and demonstrate the approach in a practical use case.