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Towards an ontology-based generic interface for field device capabilities in automation systems
(2024)
Field devices play an important role in the automation industry, providing the means to sense and control industrial processes. With the emergence of the Industry 4.0 strategy within the last decade, field devices now require an intelligent description that enables interoperability regardless of communication protocols and standards. Organizations such as the OPC UA Foundation and the Industrie 4.0 Platform are leading the way with standardized metadata models for describing intelligent systems. These standards enable the definition of interoperable semantic models that provide static and dynamic information for sensors and actuators. However, an open issue is the definition of a generic interface that abstracts the specific domain concepts from the different standards and field device organizations. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based interface to obtain generic field device capabilities and their relation to a field device-specific implementation. This approach allows industrial systems to automatically retrieve information from field devices without having to understand the specific semantics of a protocol and provides a bridge between the raw process data and a generalized definition that can be reused across devices. A proof of concept is presented with the integration of the generic interface for field devices and its implementation on a Programmable Logic Controller with a CODESYS runtime.
Interoperability at the field level is dependent on the specific technology implementation and its semantics. Integrating field devices with different communication protocols is not a simple process, as there is no direct semantic mapping between them. In recent years, standards such as the OPC UA Field eXchange and the Asset Administration Shell have proposed neutral data models to reduce the heterogeneity of field device semantics. However, to integrate different field device standards, a formal mapping between the semantic terms of these standards and the neutral data models must still be defined. A research topic that remains open is how different standards can be automatically mapped to a neutral interface independent of their implementation. In this paper we present a novel approach that generalizes the semantics of field devices at the communication level, enabling the use of inference rules that are independent of specific standards. Our method, based on the Industry 4.0 Field Device ontology, identifies the generic type of any field device and provides an interoperable capability description adaptable to various protocols. The framework includes a semantic broker that automates the creation of device instances, executes inference requests, and generates a generic semantic model for field devices. The objective of this work is to simplify the integration of field device semantics, with a generalization of the application layer and facilitate their mapping to other higher-level data models.