Interoperability of the future factory: an overview of concepts and research challenges. (4th July 2020) - Xu, Lai
Interoperability is a key factor in implementing a future factory. In European Union context interoperability is the ability of organisations to interact towards mutually beneficial goals, involving the sharing of information and knowledge between these organisations, through the business processes they support, by means of the exchange of data between their Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems. Interoperability of future factory synthesizes software components, application solutions, business processes and business context throughout the diversified, heterogeneous, autonomous procedure, assembled from multiple independent factories or smart/digital factory networks. As a part of research results of EU H2020 "vF Interoperation suppoRting buSiness innovaTion" (FIRST) project, we present a comprehensive review on basic concepts of factories of the future. The relationships among smart factory, digital factory and virtual factory are studied. In this paper, we define future factory interoperability and outline the research challenges related to interoperability.