Design challenges for CPS-based service systems in industrial production and logistics

ABSTRACT

The emergence and continuing rise of cyber-physical systems (CPS) poses significant challenges and opportunities for production and logistics firms. In order to exploit the potential of CPS in the corporate context, it is essential to understand CPS applications from a holistic systems perspective. This service systems perspective creates an understanding of the processes, activities and the corresponding resources (participants, information, technologies). In order to expand the knowledge on the design of such service systems, this paper identifies CPS applications from industrial production and logistics and analyses their influence on processes, activities and resources. By combining related literature and interviews with specialists from both industries, the following four key challenges for the design of service systems were identified: (i) the challenge of ‘information management’, meaning the design and management of information flows and the related infrastructure; (ii) the collaboration management’ between the internal and external actors involved in the service system; (iii) the capability exploitation’ of CPS; and (iv) the ‘management of the increasing complexity’ of CPS-based service systems, which results from an extended resource base.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyber-physical systems
• service system engineering
• design challenges; industrial production
• logistics; smart CPS

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this paper was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the course of the project SmartDiF (Fraunhofer FKZ 02K15Z001).