IIP-Ecosphere Platform Requirements (Usage View)

This Whitepaper describes a shared view on the IIP-Ecosphere platform, which was developed as a core technical contribution of the IIP-Ecosphere Think Thank “Platforms”, to foster and complement the requirements collection of the platform, based on this shared view on envisioned platform functionality. Following the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture [IIRA], this Whitepaper describes the IIP-Ecosphere platform from the Usage Viewpoint. The Usage View on the IIP-Ecosphere platform that we discuss in this document represents the common view of all partners involved in the design, the subsequent implementation and, finally, the operations of the platform based on the voice of the prospective users of the platform in the IIP-Ecosphere community. The Usage View plays the role of a set of high-level usage-based requirements to drive the more detailed requirements collection to define the Functional View on the platform.
The Usage View presented in this Whitepaper was collected in terms of a series of workshops with all interested project partners. Based on discussions of partners with interests in the platform and the platform architecture, i.e., the Think Tank “Platform” and the work package “AI Accelerator”, a joint vision of the IIP-Ecosphere is created. Based on the precursor work on the related edge configuration and management by the Lab Networks Industry 4.0 testbed “edge configuration” [LNI-UV], the authors used the joint vision as basis for creating a proposal of the system entities, the roles and the activities documenting the interaction to be supported by the IIP-Ecosphere platform. This proposal was discussed, as stated, with interested project partners in terms of a series of workshops, namely a general requirements workshop and several focus workshops. All workshops were online workshops, due to the Corona situation at the time of the workshops, using online collaboration techniques, such as interactive whiteboards, with two to three hours of interaction with the stakeholders and intermediate feedback phases between the workshops. All workshops first introduced the approach and provided space for the participants to discuss, improve and develop the system entities, the roles and, in particular, the activities. The shared Usage View is also aimed at supporting further discussions between the different Think Tanks of the IIP-Ecosphere platform, which are the Think Tanks: “Platforms”, “Data”, AI and Production” and “Business Models”. The shared Usage View established in this document therefore provides a basis for deriving/validating the functional and quality requirements of the overall platform and, thus, enables the subsequent work on the development of the concepts and solutions established in the shared Usage View presented in this Whitepaper.
Due to time and resource limitations, it was important to prioritize the topics to be covered. For this current version of the Usage View, we jointly decided to focus on application building, distribution and AI services, as these topics strongly correlate with the technical foundations of the platform to be developed. For this focus, we describe a System under Consideration with 18 entities, 19 roles and 67 activities in this Whitepaper. As also important topics like interconnections between platform instances, security and data protection are currently not in this focus, we plan to initiate a second round of workshops and to update this Usage View accordingly.