Integrating Multi-Disciplinary Offline and Online Engineering in Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems through DevOps

Industry 4.0 is transforming industrial automation systems into increasingly complex cyber-physical systems (CPS). In particular, there is a need to integrate systems across horizontal and vertical layers across industrial and disciplinary domains. The development of industrial CPS requires not only high-level configuration and control at the execution system level, but also offline and online engineering (OOE) work, including mechanical and electrical engineering of the devices, their installation, networking, and documentation. Using DevOps, a collection of modern software lifecycle management tactics, we propose to build an integrated platform to manage the OOE tasks. Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and Infrastructure as Code, which are key aspects of DevOps, coordinate the building, testing, and deployment of software services. To bring the corresponding benefits of pure software systems to industrial CPS, we integrate engineering tasks using distributed version control and the W3C Web of Things. As a proof of concept, we implemented the concept for a mock system that includes the OOE tasks in a process automation scenario. The DevOps platform provides a structured transfer and exchange of engineering knowledge among stakeholders involved in industrial CPS.