The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and Plattform Industrie 4.0 have announced the publication of a joint whitepaper, “Architecture Alignment and Interoperability” that details the mapping and alignment between the two leading industrial internet of things (IIoT) reference architecture models, the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) and the Reference Architecture Model for Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), published by the two organizations respectively.
“In a connected world with a network of IIoT applications, interoperability and standardization, including the lingua franca of machine2machine communication, is imperative,” said Dr. Tanja Rueckert, President IoT & Digital Supply Chain, SAP (News - Alert), and Chair of the IIC Steering Committee. “I am happy to see that our efforts to lead IIoT architectures IIRA and RAMI 4.0 to work in concert have been fruitful.”
The white paper documents the highly complementary nature of the two reference architectures. The IIRA looks at IIoT across industries, stressing cross-industry commonality and interoperability, while RAMI 4.0 focuses on manufacturing and related value-chain lifecycles. It is important and valuable for IIRA and RAMI 4.0 to enable interoperability among IIoT systems that are built based on these reference architectures.
“The next steps include addressing the semantic interoperability between the two architecture models and exploring how to leverage Industrie 4.0 components from RAMI 4.0 for smart components and devices in the IIRA,” said Martin Hankel, Project leader Industry 4.0, Bosch Rexroth AG, Co-Chair of the IIC and Plattform Joint Task Group 2.
“The IIC and Plattform Industrie 4.0 understand the need to ensure interoperability between the leading connectivity standards. We are excited to work together to combine the strengths of both DDS and OPC UA for manufacturing and other industries,” said Dr. Stan Schneider, CEO, Real-Time Innovations, Inc.
Click here to read the Architecture & Interoperability White Paper (News - Alert).