Adaptive Integration of IoT with Informatics Systems for Collaborative Industry: The SITL-IoT Case

Legacy industrial infrastructures are facing complex challenges to evolve to integrated solutions through the adoption of novel computing and business paradigms. The fast-growing collaborative businesses introduce the additional complexity of managing cooperative interactions among systems of business partners. The SITL-IoT research project aims to develop an open integrated and collaborative systems landscape for the silos agri-food industry. This case considers a silos’ operator managing a maritime silos terminal in collaboration with the seaport administration, where trucks transfer bulk products to silos or bulk storages and distribute them to factories. The existing legacy management and supervision solutions are neither integrated nor properly prepared to cope with collaborative processes. Furthermore, the interactions with business partners are complex and follow dedicated integration solutions that pose difficult challenges in terms of management and evolution, since they do not follow open collaborative models or technology implementations. This paper discusses the problem domain and the approach to co-design and implement a technology-agnostic open integration infrastructure to support such collaborative network. The proposed approach considers a multi-supplier strategy for the adaptive integration of things on Internet of Things (IoT), considering the collaborative networks dimension.