Formal and architectural competitive factors in industrial informatics

Industrial informatics (II) is increasingly becoming a competitive factor in many industrial segments. Being based on key enabling technologies such as high-speed networks, mobile agent and the object oriented development paradigm, II acts vertically at all levels of the production process, ranging from resource management down to sensor integration. Although each of these technologies has been available for a relatively long time, it is their specific combination that confers advantages to the II approach. An inquiry naturally arises about what exactly is the theoretical and architectural ground for these combined benefits? We try to answer this question considering traditional competitive factors in industry such as system configuration, planning, supervision, or fault detection. The final goal, just touched in this paper, was the definition of appropriate metrics that could quantify these benefits