Proposed Enterprise Architecture Solutions for Industry 4.0 Manufacturing

By Cole Rogers

‘The vision of Industry 4.0 is significantly higher productivity, efficiency, and self-managing production processes where people, machines, equipment, logistics systems, and work-in-process components communicate and cooperate with each other directly’ (Lydon 2016).

Succinctly, Industry 4.0 is a vision of future manufacturing environments with a wide-spread adoption and extreme integration of modern Information Technology systems. It is a strategic vision of future manufacturing organizations based on advanced Information Technology. It is also a vision that can strongly benefit from the principles of Enterprise Architecture that enable organizations to ‘achieve the right balance between IT efficiency and business innovation’ (The Open Group 2011).

This paper was written to inform Business and IT Executives of the potential enterprise-wide value of Industry 4.0 simulation-based information assets. Combined together, Industry 4.0 and Enterprise Architecture concepts can provide a basis for manufacturing organizations to realize high returns on simulation based knowledge and information. Industry 4.0 provides the strategic technological vision. While Enterprise Architecture, and its associated systems of governance, provide a proven, disciplined, organizing logic for achieving this vision. This paper describes the combination of these concepts and presents a draft proposal to maximize the enterprise-wide value of Industry 4.0 simulation-based information assets. The proposal is based on formal Enterprise Architecture principles strongly influenced by TOGAF, The Open Group Architectural Framework (The Open Group 2011).

Editor’s Note: One of our readers, Anna Kucirkova, has contacted EAPJ to provide more information on Industry 4.0. You can find a very easy to understand definition of Industry 4.0, and the technologies that have converged to drive this new wave of innovation, in Anna’s article here: https://www.iqsdirectory.com/resources/ultimate-guide-everything-need-to-know-about-industry-4-0/ Thanks Anna.