Reducing integration effort for cyber-physical systems through integrated information modelling using annotated application code

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) increasingly make use of modelling technologies like OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). These modelling technologies already reduce integration efforts as they provide a common Application Programming Interface (API) to handle and access properties and methods that are exposed by applications running on the CPS. These properties and methods can be structured and enriched with semantics within an information model. The integration of the information model with the application is still a quite complex task that typically requires comparable large manual programming efforts and additional components to manage the interaction between application and model. This work targets especially at more complex applications that shall be configurable through the information model — therefore a use case of a configurable state-machine is discussed in this work. To manage the interaction between such a dynamic application and an information model, a tight coupling of both is required. This work targets at re-use and integration of application code with information modelling based on annotations added to the application code. As a result, the object-structure and the (business) logic of the objects is integrated with the model. Finally, the external consumer can not only read, write and browse the exposed properties and methods of the application, but also create, update and delete objects within the object-structure with minimal additional manual efforts.