The four essential Industry 4.0 design principles information transparency, technical assistance, interconnection and decentralized decisions introduce new requirements to industrial systems. These requirements often bring the challenge of integrating information technology (IT) solutions, which are prevalent on the office floor level of a production facility and operational technology (OT) solutions, which are found on its shop floor. Due to the different characteristics of the worlds of IT and OT, however, this requires bringing together the needs of different stakeholders with often contradicting system requirements, which leads to increased overall system complexity. The Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) has been proposed to address challenges for the design of Industry 4.0 production systems, however, while developing industrial system architectures is strongly encouraged with this three-dimensional model, it is known to be difficult to apply to actual projects. Thus, in this work, we demonstrate Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) along with a practical application of RAMI4.0. Both, IT and OT system complexity, are being reduced by abstracting system functionality, thus making it easier to understand and meet requirements for both sides. We demonstrate the interconnection of domain-specific models during the system architecture development phase, thus reducing system complexity when integrating IT and OT solutions. Our result is evaluated with the gamified scenario of playing the game of Nine Men's Morris using geographically distributed robot cells.

翻译：工业4.0的四大核心设计原则——信息透明、技术辅助、互联互通与分散决策——为工业系统提出了新的要求。这些要求通常带来集成信息技术（IT）解决方案与运营技术（OT）解决方案的挑战，前者常见于生产设施的办公层面，后者则存在于其车间层面。然而，由于IT与OT领域的不同特性，这需要统筹不同利益相关方往往相互矛盾的系统需求，从而导致整体系统复杂性的增加。参考架构模型工业4.0（RAMI4.0）已被提出以应对工业4.0生产系统设计中的挑战，但在开发工业系统架构时，尽管这一三维模型被强烈推荐使用，却已知其难以应用于实际项目。因此，在本研究中，我们展示了基于模型的系统工程（MBSE）以及RAMI4.0的实践应用。通过抽象系统功能，IT与OT的系统复杂性均得以降低，从而使双方需求更易于理解和满足。我们演示了在系统架构开发阶段领域特定模型的互联，从而在集成IT与OT解决方案时降低系统复杂性。我们的结果通过使用地理分布机器人单元进行九子棋游戏这一游戏化场景进行了评估。