A Survey: Microservices Architecture in Advanced Manufacturing Systems

Plug & Produce is an important part of the 4th industrial revolution (I4.0) that focuses on product development and production scenarios, demanding rapid adaptation to customer needs, with minimum effort, and no business interruption. Achieving this requires the use of flexible and agile automation systems. Microservices Architecture can be an opportunity to bring such flexibility and agility to industrial automation systems. Since Microservices Architecture is a new paradigm in service-oriented systems, an in-depth analysis from the industrial automation perspective is necessary in order to figure out why and how this new architecture could be helpful to build flexible automation systems. In this paper we first clearly describe and characterize the Microservices Architecture. We next discuss an existing paradox in microservice granularity, and suggest an approach to solve the mentioned paradox. Then we compare this new approach to the Service Oriented Architecture, highlight the key (dis)advantages of utilizing Microservice Architecture in building flexible automation systems that fits in 4th industrial revolution needs, and describe the challenges to its future adoption.