A systematic literature review of communications standards in discrete manufacturing

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has a particular emphasis on the data landscape of production facilities. Data is needed to gain essential insights from the production machinery to support operations management in better decision-making or indirectly by feeding decision support systems. Such data is encapsulated in an industrial communication standard to organize in a higher-level ontology. It is challenging for operation technology specialists to have an overview of all those standards because they are numerous. This work contributes a solution to this problem by systematically approaching the literature to give an overview of the industrial communication standards landscape. The method used is a systematic literature review with a backward and forward search consisting of three main phases: 1. keyword-based search on different platforms, 2. abstract screening, and 3. full-text screening. Over 2,100 article abstracts have been parsed systematically to condense it to the most relevant 309 full-text articles. This work presents an overview of the most significant industrial communication standards mentioned in these articles. Several use cases and some brief IT-security-relevant aspects are presented as well.