Towards Uniform and Consistent Data Modelling of Resources in Distributed Industrial Control Systems

Industrial automation systems are evolving. Approaches such as software-defined manufacturing aim to overcome the barriers of rigid predefined structures in the manufacturing domain. When functionality of the production hardware is defined by software services, new types of resources have to be modeled to depict the automation system in its entirety. Since software is executed on computing resources, and these directly influence the behavior of the manufacturing system, an approach to consistently model these different types of resources is necessary. In this paper, we present a model to depict production and compute resources continuously and uniformly.