Within the context of international cooperation, Plattform Industrie 4.0 is promoting expert exchanges and above all the continued development of reference architectures and standards. With this in mind, an important mile stone is the cooperation between the Platform and the Industrial Internet Consortium which has been running since 02 March 2016. During a joint workshop in Chicago on 19 May 2016, both initiatives moved forward in discussing a joint roadmap in detail.

Joint road map
In March 2016, both initiatives already laid a foundation for working on concrete results with a joint road map. Right from the start, the main focus was on the areas of standardization and joint test environments.

Current results from the Chicago meeting
During the productive joint meeting in Chicago, both initiatives expand the existing road map by adding concrete areas of work:

• Applying a life cycle perspective on products, production systems and IoT solutions
• Pushing the cooperation on test environments in planning to define first show cases from single factory to cross-factory to cross-domain testbeds
• Working on thought leadership and providing guidance in building a common understanding of trustworthiness as a core concept to crucial aspects of security
• Clarifying on how exactly the architecture models RAMI 4.0 and IIRA fit together and work on testbeds to perform mappings to understand the relationships between the two frameworks
• Driving requirements for standardization and compatibility on various levels
  

Follow-up meetings have been scheduled in order to build up on the positive dynamics of the meeting.

Background information on the cooperation
Prior to the official announcement of the transatlantic cooperation on 02 March 2016, a number of meetings took place between representatives of both initiatives – the latest such meeting taking place in autumn 2015 in Zurich. The main focus of these exchanges was the interaction between the two architecture models RAMI (Reference Architecture Model for Industry 4.0) and IIRA (Industrial Internet Reference Architecture), in order to ensure future interoperability between the systems.

You can find more on the IIC ​here and on Plattform Industrie 4.0 here.