SLA-Driven Software Orchestration in Industry 4.0

In the Industry 4.0 vision, the orchestration of software components plays a crucial role in enabling the continuous reconfiguration, programming, and evolution of the factory floor elements. The objective of an Industry 4.0 software orchestration system is to manage the software elements controlling one or more industrial processes with the purpose of enforcing specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for each connected use case (e.g., cooperative robots and connected workers). The orchestration systems currently available are not equipped to guarantee programmable industrial SLA, making it difficult to meet carrier grade reliability and reduced time to repair required by Operational Technology (OT). This article investigates research directions and use cases to manage programmable SLAs with four criticality levels in order to enable the use of orchestration in industrial scenarios. The main contribution is an approach, differentiated by workload criticality level, that uses proactive and reactive orchestration actions to meet industrial functional and non-functional requirements, and to mitigate SLA violations. The approach is exemplified through Industry 4.0 use-case scenarios. © 2018 IEEE.