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The Digital Thread in Industry 4.0

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Integrated Formal Methods (IFM 2019)

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Abstract

Industry 4.0, the new wave of Smart Manufacturing in Europe and globally, relies on a Digital Thread to connect the data and processes for smarter products, smarter production, and smarter integrated ecosystems. But what is the Digital Thread?

We discuss a few key questions about modelling, the nature of models and the use of models that arose from the experience in the first two years of Confirm, the Irish Centre for Smart Manufacturing. We also provide an example of how the new model-powered and integrated thinking can disrupt the status quo, empower a better understanding, and deliver a more automatic management of the many cross-dimensional issues that future connected software and systems will depend upon.

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Notes

  1. 1.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Romain Poussin and Jean-Baptiste Chanier, who implemented the Proof of Concept of the UR3 Controller demo.

This work was supported, in part, by Science Foundation Ireland grant 16/RC/3918 and co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund through the Southern & Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Confirm, the Smart Manufacturing SFI Research Centre (www.confirm.ie).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Software Systems, University of Limerick, and Confirm, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria & Alexander Schieweck

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  1. Tiziana Margaria
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  2. Alexander Schieweck
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Correspondence to Tiziana Margaria .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Wolfgang Ahrendt

  2. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Silvia Lizeth Tapia Tarifa

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Margaria, T., Schieweck, A. (2019). The Digital Thread in Industry 4.0. In: Ahrendt, W., Tapia Tarifa, S. (eds) Integrated Formal Methods. IFM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11918. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34968-4_1

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