Tackling Problems of Maintenance and Evolution in Industry 4.0 Scenarios Using a Distributed Architecture

Growing complexity in Industry 4.0 environments goes hand in hand with an increasing number of vulnerabilities. Due to internal and external influences, these vulnerabilities can cause a negative effect on the production process as well as the finished product.
These influences include e. g., defective machine tools, deviations in quality or configuration changes of an assembly line, which in turn require to adjust the model and the workflow of the respective facility to prevent risks to human health or minimise costs due to production stops. To evaluate the necessity of a novel approach to handle these vulnerabilities and influences along with their subsequent system adaptation, three emerging problems are identified and provide the basis for the discussion of a distributed architecture that aims to facilitate the evolution of context models, workflows and configurations while allowing for reasonable involvement of human operators.