Migrating legacy production lines into an Industry 4.0 ecosystem

Despite the Industry 4.0, most of the production lines today are what is sometimes called "legacy", and cannot be replaced overnight by Industry 4.0 versions and thus still have to be maintained for quite some time. In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of a logical connector that enables the migration (also known as "to retrofit") of legacy production lines into an Industry 4.0 ecosystem, with the production lines remaining almost unchanged. To do that, four main challenges had to be addressed, namely: the data accessibility challenge, the data interoperability challenge, the machine variability challenge, and the resource usage challenge. In the end, the logical connector presented in this paper has shown to enable the migration of legacy production lines into an Industry 4.0 ecosystem and thus to reap some of the benefits promised by Industry 4.0.