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. 2021 Jun 10;21(12):4010.
doi: 10.3390/s21124010.

Data Spine: A Federated Interoperability Enabler for Heterogeneous IoT Platform Ecosystems

Rohit A Deshmukh  1 , Dileepa Jayakody  2 , Alexander Schneider  1 , Violeta Damjanovic-Behrendt  2
Affiliations

Data Spine: A Federated Interoperability Enabler for Heterogeneous IoT Platform Ecosystems

Rohit A Deshmukh et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is pervasive and characterized by the rapid growth of IoT platforms across different application domains, enabling a variety of business models and revenue streams. This opens new opportunities for companies to extend their collaborative networks and develop innovative cross-platform and cross-domain applications. However, the heterogeneity of today's platforms is a major roadblock for mass creation of IoT platform ecosystems, pointing at the current absence of technology enablers for an easy and innovative composition of tools/services from the existing platforms. In this paper, we present the Data Spine, a federated platform enabler that bridges IoT interoperability gaps and enables the creation of an ecosystem of heterogeneous IoT platforms in the manufacturing domain. The Data Spine allows the ecosystem to be extensible to meet the need for incorporating new tools/services and platforms. We present a reference implementation of the Data Spine and a quantitative evaluation to demonstrate adequate performance of the system. The evaluation suggests that the Data Spine provides a multitude of advantages (single sign-on, provision of a low-code development environment to support interoperability and an easy and intuitive creation of cross-platform applications, etc.) over the traditional approach of users joining multiple platforms separately.

Keywords: Cloud Manufacturing; IoT ecosystem; IoT platform interoperability; Service-Oriented Architecture; Smart Manufacturing; digital manufacturing platforms; federated IoT platforms; industry 4.0; lot-size-one manufacturing; smart factory.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
An illustration of interoperability gaps between services of heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) platforms.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Conceptual overview of the EFPF (European Factory Platform) ecosystem.
Figure 3
Figure 3
High-level architecture of the Data Spine.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Abstract class diagram for the service registry.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Detailed architecture of the Data Spine.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Illustration of the creation and runtime operation of an integration flow.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Reference implementation of the Data Spine.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Components of Apache NiFi’s graphical user interface (GUI) and a sample workflow.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Synchronous services’ integration through the Data Spine.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Example of synchronous communication workflow through the Data Spine.
Figure 11
Figure 11
Asynchronous services’ integration through Data Spine.
Figure 12
Figure 12
Example of asynchronous communication workflow through the Data Spine.
Figure 13
Figure 13
Realisation of an integrated marketplace solution in the EFPF ecosystem.
Figure 14
Figure 14
Realisation of a composite anomaly detection and alerting application in the EFPF ecosystem.
Figure 15
Figure 15
High-level workflows and API calls for realising the integrated marketplace solution: (a) the traditional approach, and (b) the Data Spine approach.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. EFPF (European Connected Factory Platform for Agile Manufacturing) Project. [(accessed on 6 January 2021)]; Available online: https://www.efpf.org.
    1. European Collaborative Manufacturing and Logistics Cluster. [(accessed on 6 January 2021)]; Available online: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/op....

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