Productive 4.0 is pushing the future in numerous ways. Together with the ECSEL research project MANTIS which is focusing on Cyber Physical Systems based proactive collaborative maintenance it is going to organize a special session on IC-ICPS. The acronym stands for Interoperability Challenges for the Industrial Cyber Physical Systems.

The special session will be part of the first IEEE International ICPS Conference taking place from 15 to 18 May this year in St. Petersburg, Russia. According to the organizer of the event, they will provide the opportunity to focus on particular topics of interest. Research work both in Productive 4.0 and MANTIS show that interoperability is an aspect of increasing importance.

Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) are being deployed in various segments of the industry. Some of the systems utilize the concept of digital twins; others use the cyber-connectedness to process the data connected at the physical world real-time, and use the result in other systems. No matter how they are structured and implemented, interoperability issues become more severe along with growing expectations regarding Industry 4.0 solutions.

It takes a common language

With various legacy and future IT systems being designed with minimal awareness towards CPS interoperability, new challenges arise and related problems have to be solved. Besides addressing details, the research community is working on frameworks and general concepts to bring the best ideas and concepts on the tropic together. In simple words: instead of isolated or incompatible systems it takes a common language.

As to the special session, individual contributions could cover a broad range of interesting aspects, be it semantic operability, interworking between systems, real-time, security and safety issues, frameworks or case studies, just to mention a few.

Anyone who is interested to point out a specific topic is welcome to submit their paper. The instructions may be found on the conference website https://icps2018.net/special-sessions/.

The organization of the special session is conducted by LTU work package 1 co-leader Jerker Delsing from Luleå University of Technology, Sweden and Pal Varga from Budapest University of Technology and Economics.