Towards Cyber-Physical Infrastructure as-a-Service (CPIaaS) in the Era of Industry 4.0

The crucial role of resilience and interoperability in today’s highly dynamic cyber-physical systems (CPSs), where (timely) human intervention is limited, calls for a holistic vision that facilitates the autonomous orchestration of cyber-physical processes on the field-level. However, traditional automation and control systems are designed as static silos, which are generally configured once for a specific purpose. Hence, these systems lack the flexibility to efficiently adjust to dynamically changing system requirements, which includes the integration of heterogeneous devices and services on-request, or elastic features such as on-demand provisioning of computing and storage resources. In this work, we propose a reference architecture for implementing a cyber-physical infrastructure as-a-service (CPIaaS) framework. This framework is based on the concept of service-oriented virtualization and provides a level of flexibility and interoperability to CPS, that cannot be matched using traditional approaches for building highly integrated, cross-platform, inter-domain communication environments.