Integration of Classical Components Into Industrial Cyber–Physical Systems

Industrial automation systems continuously get more complex and growing over time. This leads to an ever growing demand for efficient integration task bridging the gap between technologies, tools used across the enterprise, and alongside the value chain. With the new challenges imposed by introducing cyber–physical systems (CPSs) into industrial applications and while addressing Industry 4.0 concepts, the matter of integration is becoming even more crucial for the introduction of new technologies and their acceptance to customers. This paper introduces integration tasks to be tackled and describes up-to-date technologies as they are used in today’s automation industry. This is the basis for concepts addressing the integration issue when introducing CPSs and establishing mixed systems. Investigations are made regarding exploiting integration strategies for future systems.