Autor: Karl Hribernik

Social media and the digitalisation of products allow a direct view into product and service use and customer experience. This Product Usage Information may be used systematically in product and service development. However, this requires its interoperability with relevant processes and IT systems. This paper presents an approach and its implementation as an IT platform which fulfils these prerequisites.

Whilst bIoTope should be understood as a highly flexible and dynamic ecosystem capable of seamlessly integrating arbitrary proprietary IoT platforms, it nevertheless builds upon several core components, which provide essential functionality. Those functionalities referenced in this article, are agnostic to other ecosystem-external systems. Inside of the ecosystem, a micro-service-architecture MSA approach is applied. Using O-MI for technical Interoperability and O-DF for syntactic and semantic interoperability are foundation pillars of the ecosystem.

Along with increasing complexity and dynamics the importance of cyber-physical systems in production and logistics also increases. Hence, the BIBA - Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH at the University of Bremen considers the application of cyber-physical systems in logistics. This paper presents the approach for the development of a cyber-physical logistics system. To start we describe the fundamental terms cyber-physical system and cyber-physical production system. Following these definitions we explain the term cyber-physical logistics system. Afterwards we describe the course of action; in particular necessary steps within the development of a cyber-physical logistics system are explained. In detail we present the procedure consisting of requirements analysis, conception and simulation-based evaluation.

The vision of the “Internet of Things” describes networked, interactive objects which are capable of autonomous decision-taking. The potentials of this vision for logistics in the automotive and food sector go from tracking and tracing throughout the supply-chain, via quality assurance and monitoring through to new service models and consequently completely novel sources of revenue. Key elements of the “Internet of Things” such as auto-identification technology or sensors are already mature and ready to be used in logistics. On the basis of a series of industry case studies, this article describes the current situation in industry with regards to these technologies and identifies future potential. To facilitate the analysis, it presents an instrument by which the level of implementation of the technologies of the “Internet of Things” can be measured.