O-MI/O-DF standards as interoperability enablers for Industrial Internet: A performance analysis

The Industrial Internet should provide means to create ad hoc and loosely coupled information flows between objects, users, services, and business domain systems. However, today's technologies and products often feed 'vertical silos' (e.g., vertical/siloed apps), which inevitably result in multiple and non-interoperable systems. Standardization will play an ever-increasing part in enabling information to flow between such vertically-oriented closed systems. This paper presents recent IoT messaging standards, notably O-MI (Open Messaging Interface) and O-DF (Open Data Format), whose initial requirements were defined for enhanced collaboration and interoperability in product lifecycle management. The performance of those standards is evaluated in terms of efficiency ratio, defined as the percentage of payload over traffic load. A first analytical model of the efficiency ratio based on the required/basic standard specifications is then proposed. A smart maintenance use case relying on the first version of the standard reference implementation is developed, based on which our analytical model is applied to evaluate the degree of deviation (w.r.t. the standard specifications) of this reference implementation.