Industrial application, particularly automation, is a highly complex challenge today, primarily addressed by Operational Technology (OT) like SCADA, DCS, PLC systems. To explore IT technology in this domain, solutions make use of System of Systems (SoS) integration platforms based on SOA. It’s most critical to meet industry-relevant automation requirements, such as hard real-time properties, security, safety, scalability, and engineering efficiency.
The Eclipse Arrowhead project is tackling these requirements by providing an extensive SOA architecture infrastructure for distributed and modularised solutions from edge to cloud.
Design and Deploy SoS Integration Platforms With End User Solutions
Eclipse Arrowhead has been actively developed since 2013, primarily supported by a number of very large EU projects, like Arrowhead, Productive4.0, Arrowhead Tools, AIMS5.0, and Arrowhead fPVN. The current version is 4.6.1 (http://github.com/eclipse-arrowhead/core-java-spring).
Eclipse Arrowhead provides an extensive infrastructure for distributed and modularised
solutions from edge to cloud, based on the Service Oriented Architecture, SOA paradigm. This infrastructure has been used by several companies to implement customer solution architectures based on SOA, as indicated in Figure 1. Beyond its developmental progress, Eclipse Arrowhead serves as a robust foundation for numerous industrial applications. These capabilities have enabled various companies to develop SOA integration platforms, fostering the implementation of customer solution architectures (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Eclipse Arrowhead and its reference implementation provide an SOA architecture infrastructure. This foundation allows technology suppliers to build their integration platforms, enabling them to offer tailored solutions and associated implementation for their primary application markets.
Arrowhead Supports Industrial Applications via Abstraction and Local Clouds
The Eclipse Arrowhead project consists of microsystems with associated microservices that are essential for anyone to design, implement, and deploy System of Systems (SoS) integration platforms as well as end user solutions. The foundational concept of the Eclipse Arrowhead is based on the concept of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), providing users with a robust SOA architecture core infrastructure for look-up, late binding, and loose coupling SOA properties and security. This infrastructure is complemented by a set of support microsystems and microservices for a range of important SOA architecture properties like:
- A wide range of interoperability
- Advanced security
- SoS support
- Workflow management
- Engineering tools
- Modelling support
- Documentation
Building on these core and support microsystems, the Eclipse Arrowhead framework is not just a conceptual model. It is also a tangible technology stack guided by industrial automation requirements.
The Arrowhead Framework addresses distributed and modularised IoT/SoS solutions from edge to cloud based on industrial automation and digitalisation requirements. The information exchange between individual Internet of Things is abstracted to services. This enables IoT interoperability in between almost any IoT elements.
In addition, translators and adaptors support interoperability with legacy and OT technology. The Eclipse Arrowhead technology stack, currently in version 4.6.1, is depicted in Figure 2.
Support for industry requirements on real-time control and operation is based on the idea of self-contained local clouds (Figure 3). Unlike global clouds, an Arrowhead local cloud is self-contained, and enables hard real-time properties, data and system security, system engineering, and scalability of automation systems, especially at the edge and deep edge.
Figure 3. The Arrowhead concept of local clouds indicating the self-contained SOA and functional properties, and the capability of enabling inter-cloud service exchanges featuring SOA properties and security.
Eclipse Arrowhead v5.0
Currently, v5.0 is under specification, primarily driven by a number of companies supported by a set of universities. The primary ambition is to enhance the support for commercial integration of SOA into brown-field industry operations and to provide more extensive security and interoperability support. This enhances business opportunities for the Eclipse Arrowhead commercial ecosystem with twenty or so companies, mainly SMEs.
Eclipse Arrowhead Commercial Ecosystem
Several ecosystem companies already use the architecture and reference implementation code in their commercial platforms, products, and customer solutions. These are now sold in volume to, for example, the mining industry and the automotive industry. The most active companies, such as Thingwave, Sinetiq, and AITIA, are building their primary business offerings around Eclipse Arrowhead. Products and solutions range from MES systems in automative production to complex sensor and data collection solutions in the mining industry, with integration to major global mining technology suppliers. Several of these companies have shown very rapid growth since 2020.
To further illustrate the impact of Eclipse Arrowhead, the project's YouTube channel offers a closer look at these collaborations. The channel showcases videos featuring these companies and their customers. In one of these videos, we engage in a dialogue with key staff of three different companies:
- The CEO of Thingwave, who discusses rapid advancements in the mining industry
- The chief architect of Sinetiq, detailing the delivery of a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for a premium automative brand
- The automation manager of Boliden, who shares insights into the journey of integrating this architecture into their mining operations. He was convinced of the importance of this architecture but admitted that it was a long journey for them to actually exploit the full potential within Boliden.
Arrowhead Is Delivering Proven Cost Savings
This is a significant industrial challenge. Here, the Arrowhead Tools project has tested 28 industrial use cases. All 28 showed engineering cost and time savings with an average of about 70% (the range was 30-95%) compared to traditional OT technology. These numbers underpin the value of Eclipse Arrowhead and its focus on edge integration for a very heterogeneous set of things like Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, OT technology, and so on. The microservice approach, especially at the edge, provides an open opportunity to integrate with the very successful microservices on the cloud and server level, thus providing an edge2cloud computing continuum. This provides the opportunity for efficient engineering and scalability and resilience within such a computing continuum. Currently, development on edge2cloud continuum integration is based on cooperation with metaOS technologies like Colony (https://colonyos.io/).
Ongoing Development Supported by Large EU Projects
Eclipse Arrowhead is currently being further developed and promoted by some very large EU projects — AIMS5.0 (https://aims50.eu/) and Arrowhead fPVN (https://fpvn.arrowhead.eu/fpvn-arrowhead/) — by adding new tools for model-based and AI-supported engineering, as well as autonomous data model interoperability. Both projects are also instrumental in the definition and implementation of Eclipse Arrowhead v5.0, which is expected to be released late 2024.
In addition, another 10 EU projects are using and contributing to the further development of Eclipse Arrowhead. These EU-funded research projects continuously propose and provide additions to the Arrowhead SOA infrastructure, thereby improving and extending the architecture, technology stack, and reference implementation. They also contribute to the infrastructure's validation, verification, applicability, and robustness.
Furthermore, Eclipse Arrowhead is currently part of the Eclipse IoT WG. The ambition is to build an Arrowhead Working Group based on the Eclipse Arrowhead Commercial Ecosystem members. The potential for the commercial ecosystem is growing every day, along with the opportunities for companies to use and integrate newer technologies, become more efficient, and to get more out of their investment.
Information and documentation about the Eclipse Arrowhead project can be found here, and code and documentation can be found here.
About the Author
Jerker Delsing
Jerker Delsing is the project lead on the Eclipse Arrowhead project.