Ontology implementation of OPC UA and automationML: A review

Abstract

Industry 4.0 requires standardized information models for heterogeneous platform integration. Two standards for interoperability are IEC 62,541–a machine-to-machine communication protocol expressed in OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) format––and IEC 62,714 to describe production plants or plant components expressed in AutomationML format. Despite their wide adoption, these languages ​​lack formal semantics for automatic data interpretation. This work describes a Systematic Mapping Study focused on recent studies on the transformation between the OPC UA and AutomationML languages ​​and OWL or RDF. Articles on conferences and journals from 2015 onwards are queried and analyzed from the Scopus, IEEE, and ACM databases. The study is limited to articles written in the English language and published in journals. From 43 documents, 16 are retained following the inclusion and exclusion criteria. As a result of this study, the main challenges facing Industry 4.0 are identified. These are the lack of support for the ontology engineering tasks performed by the knowledge engineer, the representation of the semantic digital twin, data duplication, and communication overhead. Germany concentrates 87% of the involved articles on the subject.