Industrie 4.0 virtual automation bus.

A main goal of the fourth industrial revolution is changeability of production processes, which is the ability to react efficiently to unplanned production changes. Existing automation system architectures limit this changeability. PLC programs used for automation include low-level behavior of actuators, strategies, management functions without information hiding. This yields unmaintainable, and therefore hard to change systems. In this paper, we document our Virtual Automation Bus that enables changeable production.