A Microservice Architecture for the Industrial Internet-Of-Things

With the introduction of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and cyber-physical system (CPS) concepts the industrial automation sector is undergoing enormous change towards highly interconnected and globally distributed automation systems. Following this trend the industry is facing interoperability challenges between devices and systems, which origin in the market and technology fragmentation of the past years. However, established integration techniques from the IoT domain cannot be fully adapted in industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) environments due to stricter dependability and real time constraints. Since design patterns offer a practical means to gain a deeper understanding of the problem domain, patterns are applied in this paper to develop a software architecture that is suitable for the deployment in the upcoming IIoT environments. The resulting software architecture combines ideas from the IoT world, industrial automation systems, as well as modern information technology (IT) and cloud architectures. Its lightweight and flexible design, along with the support of state-of-the-art development approaches (containerization, continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD)) make the architecture equally suitable for the deployment on cloud, fog and edge devices. All in all, these features facilitate the deployment of services and communication protocols on device level, to enable the transparent and automatic integration of heterogenous devices and protocols, on demand.