A Review and Analysis of the Characteristics of Cyber-physical Systems in Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) creates more efficient production processes by providing an interconnected environment between man and machine. Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are one of the many technologies that enable I4.0 by building a bridge between the physical and the virtual objects in production systems. Nonetheless, CPSs are dealing with a complex system with various emergent behaviours. CPS must be defined by features and characteristics that can adapt to the changes in real-time and derive knowledge through the gathered abundant information it receives. In this respect, this study focuses on an analysis and a review of CPS and its characteristics to explore the essence of knowledge representation in CPS metamodels. This study aims to answer the following research questions: how are CPS metamodels described and characterized? How is Knowledge represented in CPS metamodels? To respond to the research questions and achieve the purpose of this study, first a literature review was conducted to identify relevant papers, then Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) as a clustering technique is used to make a more thorough investigation of the topic, to analyse CPS characteristics, and to discover any hidden relationship between them. The analysis conducted led to an understanding of CPS’s characteristics and the discovery of any hidden relationship among them. Among all characteristics (e.g., safety, fault-tolerant, redundancy), “resiliency” was the most frequent characteristic. Consequently, with the help of the hidden bonds found by FCA among the most frequent and the most observed characteristics, a hierarchy of highly ranked CPS characteristics as a road map to reach “resiliency” is proposed. The paper presented a review and an analysis of Cyber-physical systems and their representative characteristics. A new set of definitions for the highly ranked characteristics is also introduced. The proposed definitions can help the future CPS metamodel designs so that they take a path more aligned with the concept of Industry 4.0. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.