Our paper at the ICSE 2019 conference in Montreal proposed a reference architecture for interoperable Industrie 4.0 systems:

“Industrial control systems are complex, software-intensive systems that manage mission-critical production processes. Commissioning such systems requires installing, configuring, and integrating thousands of sensors, actuators, and controllers and is still a largely manual and costly process. We introduce the vendor-neutral OpenPnP reference architecture, which can largely automate the configuration and integration tasks for commissioning. Using an example implementation, we demonstrate that OpenPnP can reduce the configuration and integration effort up to 90 percent and scales up to tens of thousands of communicated signals per second for large Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems. OpenPnP can serve as a template for practitioners implementing IIoT applications throughout the automation industry and streamline commissioning processes in many thousands of control system installations.”