Lessons Learned from developing Industrial Applications according to RAMI 4.0 by applying Model Based Systems Engineering

The transformation from original production line manufacturing towards complex value creation networks causes new challenges for manufacturing companies to stay in touch with or even delimit from the competition. This new trend, resulting from the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), offers new automation possibilities by interconnecting all system components with each other. However, as those components, mainly known as Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) are usually systems themselves, the complexity of such a manufacturing system continously rises, which even has to be classified as a complex System of Systems (SoS). Having recognized the issue of the upcoming difficulties when engineering such a system, several German institutes introduced the Reference Architecture Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), a three-dimensional framework that offers standards or methods for developing system architectures on basis of different views. Nevertheless, at the current point of view, this approach though looks good on paper, but almost none practical applications are existing yet. Thus, this paper focuses on the model-based development of system architectures according to the specifications of RAMI 4.0 in order to evaluate the practical applicability of this reference architecture for usage in actual industrial projects. This is done by utilizing two actual industrial case studies, whose models are created with the help of a specifically designed software tool, the so-called RAMI Toolbox. Based on the outcome of this work, the usage of RAMI 4.0 for application in the industrial area could be sustainably consolidated.