Smart Factory Web-A Blueprint Architecture for Open Marketplaces for Industrial Production

Featured Application The result of this work may be applied in the architectural design and development of electronic marketplaces if they claim to be usable in open ecosystems following the paradigms of the platform economy. Although the work is primarily dedicated to industrial production, its principles may also be applied to other markets and domains of the Industrial Internet of Things such as health, logistics or mobility. The paper describes a reference architecture for open marketplaces to be used for networked stakeholders in industrial production ecosystems. The motivation for such an endeavor comes from the idea to apply the basic principle of the platform economy to offer functions of an asset "as a service" to industrial production, including the associated supply chain networks. Currently, commercial offers of "production as a service" usually lead to proprietary systems with the risk of platform vendor lock-ins. Hence, there is a need for an open approach that relies upon international (emerging) standards, especially those from IETF, IEC, the Plattform Industrie 4.0 and the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA). The presented approach enables federation of marketplaces according to well-defined interfaces. This article proposes a technology-independent open architecture derived from functional and non-functional system requirements and driven by the idea of the Smart Factory Web, a testbed of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). Furthermore, the architecture of the Smart Factory Web (SFW) platform is presented and assessed against the current and future demands of open federated marketplaces for industrial production ecosystems.