IMC-AESOP outcomes: Paving the way to collaborative manufacturing systems

Industrial automation systems have been established in various domain over the past decades exploiting standards, dedicated to network protocols, resource models, interfaces, programming languages etc. While systems increasingly get networked, the potential of their interactions and collaboration, especially in large-scale and complex settings, may unveil new business opportunities. A series of challenges have been systematically tackled the last years and demonstrated the feasibility of key parts. Among them, the IMC-AESOP has paved the way from web-service enabled systems to cloud-based industrial cyber-physical systems, and demonstrated with real industrial use cases various aspects with respect to next generation supervision control and data acquisition (SCADA) that may empower collaborative industrial systems. In this paper, a selected set of innovative results achieved within the IMC-AESOP project are summarized - migration strategies to the application of service based communication, system-wide introduction of Complex Event Processing capabilities, integration concepts between different generations of technologies and provision of cloud capabilities across different levels of production systems as well as experimentation in real industrial applications.