Industry 4.0 Solutions for Interoperability: A Use Case about Tools and Tool Chains in the Arrowhead Tools Project

Industry 4.0 outlines the trend of the massively adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) nodes in supply chains, manufacturing, and factories in general. The industry digitalization is the key enabler to ease the productive process, drastically reduce its costs, and boost up the associated business. In this context, Arrowhead Tools (AHT) is a H2020 EU project provided by ECSEL that targets automation and digitalization solutions for the industry in Europe. AT is based on a framework, named Arrowhead Framework (AHF), developed and provided by the previous Arrowhead (AH) project. AHF is open source and addresses IoT-based automation and integration by abstracting IoT objects to services. AHF enables IoT interoperability and provides real time data handling, security features, automation system engineering, and automation systems scalability. In this paper, after a rapid overview of the AT project and the AHF architecture, we originally introduce the concept of Tool and Tool Chain for Industry 4.0 in AH. We also present a vertical AHT use case along with its implementation, as well as all the steps to turn a service/application into an AH-compliant Tool.