Enabling Industrial Autonomy: Digital Transformation of Automation Systems into Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems

Kurzfassung

Industrial facilities are increasingly expected to operate autonomously, adapt to changing conditions, and support higher-level services without continuous human intervention. However, today, industrial autonomy is in an early stage of maturity, where the majority of operational plants still rely on hierarchical automation pyramid architectures and fragmented supervisory control systems that are largely operated manually. Open research gaps that hinder progress towards industrial autonomy include ambiguous conceptual foundations, as well as a lack of empirically validated architectural frameworks for increasingly autonomous industrial systems.

This doctoral research addresses these research gaps and studies how automation systems can be systematically transformed into autonomous cyber-physical systems. Thereby, the research investigates the theoretical foundations of system autonomy, develops architectural frameworks for the gradual transition towards autonomous systems, and provides empirical evidence of the feasibility of system autonomy by demonstrating and evaluating the contributions in a case study in a real-world industrial plant. As a result, the thesis provides a transferable blueprint for moving industrial autonomy from a conceptually underdefined research vision into a well-defined autonomy framework that enables its operational reality.