Design of a multi-sided platform supporting CPS deployment in the automation market

Abstract

CPS technologies are already mature at European level, but adoption in small & middle enterprises is constrained by a still emerging value chain and by the challenging transformation of manufacturing processes that their deployment in a manufacturing system requires. As a matter of fact, the CPS growing market potential is scarcely supported by tools able to sustain the solid ecosystem required for a relevant market uptake. This issue becomes even more constraining the moment the concept of CPS is extended and aggregated to propose cyber-physical machines and manufacturing systems, where the complexity of the controlling intelligence and of the digital counterpart explodes. This paper aims at describing how the design and implementation of a multi-sided platform (MSP) for CPS deployment within the automation sector can provide the technological background to incentivize their adoption. In fact, the market needs an economic support to accelerate the transition towards new paradigms for the development of the software components of a mechatronic system. Developing an infrastructure on the top of which the CPS value chain can be instantiated and orchestrated, we provide the technical means to incentivize the creation of such an ecosystem able to support SMEs in their transition towards Industry 4.0.