Unveiling Relations in the Industry 4.0 Standards Landscape based on Knowledge Graph Embeddings

TL;DR

This paper proposes a knowledge graph embedding approach to analyze and identify related standards within Industry 4.0, aiming to resolve interoperability conflicts by uncovering hidden relations among standards.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of knowledge graph embeddings to detect related standards and their communities, enhancing interoperability analysis in Industry 4.0.

Findings

Relations among standards can be detected accurately

Community analysis reveals meaningful standard groupings

Embedding models effectively uncover unknown relations

Abstract

Industry~4.0 (I4.0) standards and standardization frameworks have been proposed with the goal of \emph{empowering interoperability} in smart factories. These standards enable the description and interaction of the main components, systems, and processes inside of a smart factory. Due to the growing number of frameworks and standards, there is an increasing need for approaches that automatically analyze the landscape of I4.0 standards. Standardization frameworks classify standards according to their functions into layers and dimensions. However, similar standards can be classified differently across the frameworks, producing, thus, interoperability conflicts among them. Semantic-based approaches that rely on ontologies and knowledge graphs, have been proposed to represent standards, known relations among them, as well as their classification according to existing frameworks. Albeit informative, the structured modeling of the I4.0 landscape only provides the foundations for detecting interoperability issues. Thus, graph-based analytical methods able to exploit knowledge encoded by these approaches, are required to uncover alignments among standards. We study the relatedness among standards and frameworks based on community analysis to discover knowledge that helps to cope with interoperability conflicts between standards. We use knowledge graph embeddings to automatically create these communities exploiting the meaning of the existing relationships. In particular, we focus on the identification of similar standards, i.e., communities of standards, and analyze their properties to detect unknown relations. We empirically evaluate our approach on a knowledge graph of I4.0 standards using the Trans$^*$ family of embedding models for knowledge graph entities. Our results are promising and suggest that relations among standards can be detected accurately.