Service Interface Translation. An Interoperability Approach

Interoperability plays an important role in Industry 4.0. Interoperability in the engineering process allows the automation of the engineering phase, reducing the human effort involved and the associated engineering costs. It improves the quality of the engineering process and its overall efficiency. Nevertheless, the diversity of available standards, devices, and systems leads to great levels of heterogeneity and makes it difficult to achieve the aforementioned interoperability. As the lack of interoperability increases, a generic solution to the problem is increasingly demanded by the industry. This paper approaches the interoperability problem from a service interface perspective. A novel approach is presented to address service interface heterogeneity. The proposed solution is based on service interface translation, which is achieved via the generation of service interfaces. A new system, the consumer interface generator system, has been designed and implemented to generate interface instances to solve the interoperability mismatches between service consumers and providers at runtime. In this paper, the autonomous consumer interface generation process, the system architecture, and the generated interface instance are described. The proposed approach has been validated through practical experimentation, including the implementation of a system prototype and a testbed.