A Distributed Registry of Multi-perspective Data Services for the Internet of Production

Service-oriented computing is one of the key enabling technologies to enable the digital transformation of production systems, to communicate with each other and rapidly configure themselves to meet dynamic production needs. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are also crucial to promote the horizontal integration of digital factories across multiple interleaved supply chains, forming the so-called Internet of Production (IoP). The increasing availability of services from multiple supply chains to be aggregated and composed into composite services is leading to a new service ecosystem, named Big Services. In this context, the traditional vision of service registries, with a flat organisation of services to match the mutual requirements of supply chain actors, is no more feasible. A more structured model is required, taking into account the distinction between domain-oriented atomic services, at the single actor level, and demand-oriented composite services, at the supply chain and IoP levels. In this paper, we propose the model of a distributed registry of data-oriented services in an industrial production network. The organisation of services in the registry is guided by multiple perspectives of the production network, namely: (i) the business goal of a real production network; (ii) the perspective on production data that is managed through the services; (iii) the data flow stages implemented through the services (that is, data collection, monitor, dispatch and display). The resulting portfolio of services is distributed over the production network, allowing each actor to preserve control over the owned data and enabling the dynamic composition of services at higher levels. A preliminary validation in a real case study has been performed to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.