Open Access

Paulo Leitão, Stamatis Karnouskos, Thomas I. Strasser, Xiaodong Jia, Jay Lee, Armando Walter Colombo

• Industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS) are a key element that acts as the backbone infrastructure for realizing innovative systems compliant with the fourth industrial revolution vision and requirements to realize it. Several architectures, such as the reference architectural model industry 4.0 (RAMI4.0), the industrial Internet reference architecture (IIRA), and the smart grid architecture model (SGAM), have been proposed to develop and integrate ICPS, their services, and applications for different domains. In such architectures, the digitization of assets and interconnection to relevant industrial processes and business services is of paramount importance. Different technological solutions have been developed that overwhelmingly focus on the integration of the assets with their cyber counterpart. In this context, the adoption of standards is crucial to enable the compatibility and interoperability of these network-based systems. Since industrial agents are seen as an enabler in realizing ICPS, this work aims to provide insights related to the use and alignment of the recently established IEEE 2660.1 recommended practice to support ICPS developers and engineers to integrate assets in the context of each one of the three referred reference architectures. A critical discussion also points out some noteworthy aspects that emerge when using the IEEE 2660.1 in these architectures and discusses limitations and challenges ahead.