Software-Defined Industrial Internet of Things (SD-IIoT) Oriented for Industry 4.0

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) enables interconnection and intelligent collaboration among basic industrial production factors which include human, machine, thing, method and environment. In the current IIoT applications, it is difficult for collaborative optimization and unified management and control of industrial production factors. Applications and industrial production factors are tightly coupled, so that many industrial software applications generally have the problems such as high degree of customization and difficult replication and promotion. In this paper, focusing on the most basic industrial production factors, we propose the solution and system architecture of software-defined Industrial Internet of Things (SD-IIoT) based on the ideas and technologies of software definition and Cyber-Physical System (CPS). The principle of SD-IIoT is introduced from the perspective of cyber-physical space mapping. On basis of the digital twin models of industrial production factors, the system architecture of SD-IIoT is designed, which decouples upper-level industrial applications from the underlying industrial production factors. Furthermore, the software definition mechanism based on industrial information model is proposed to abstract and describe industrial production factors with semantic technology to implement the virtualized modeling. The SD-IIoT paradigm can maximize the utilization of resources, and achieve the modular management, on-demand reusing, dynamic reconfigurability and efficient collaboration of industrial production factors, thus improving overall service capability of IIoT.