Efficient Services in the Industry 4.
0 and Intelligent
Management Network.
Antonio Martín-Montes, Mauricio Burbano,
Higher Polytechnic School
University of Seville
Seville, Spain
toni@us.es, aryburcen@us.es
Abstract— In order to permit competitive, the industry must
ensure its technology position, companies must be able to develop
services and products quickly and manage logistics and
production systems efficiently. The backbone of a successful
operation is a reliable, resilient, and secure communication
infrastructure. The effective operation of networks is vital to the
efficient governance, management, and monitoring of industrial
services. The goal is to promote the development of hybrid
intelligent systems that are essential for solving complex network
problems in industry domain. We propose a new paradigm
where the intelligent network management is integrated into the
conceptual repository of management information. A key
technology for operating large heterogeneous data transmission
is the ontology. In this work, we present an intelligent agent
founded in Case-Based Reasoning technique and ontologies.
After this, we present a case-based prototype performing a task
of closed-loop network management upon an industrial network
together with first results.
Keywords—Industry 4.0; Case-Based Reasoning; Ontology,
Semantic; Network Management.
I. INTRODUCTION
In the last few years Internet has evolved from a network
of traditional computers and servers to a global substrate
interconnecting billions of everyday devices. This revolution
is referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT).
Telecommunications networks are continuously growing in
scale and complexity, and the amount of information and
services provided more day to day. Predictions indicate that
this growth will steadily continue, some even claiming that up
to 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
Networking professionals need tools to monitor and manage
these resources and services. They need network management
systems with IoT visibility and controls. More advanced tools
are needed to support this activity and a variety of intelligent
techniques that can easily be integrated into one system under
the proposed agent framework. In this paper, we outline the
domain of network management and highlight consequences
for the application of problem solvers operating in this
domain.
There are researchers and related fields works, which
include intelligent techniques to share industrial information
such as [1]. They study the feasibility of applying and
algorithms to different problems encountered in automated
l-)))
Carlos León
Technical High School of Computer Science
University of Seville
Seville, Spain
cleon@us.
guided vehicle system design and control, besides provides
alternative options for solving control problems and
conventional automated guided vehicle system design. A
numerical procedure that makes possible to yield a concrete
number associated with its vector presentation is proposed in
[2]. S. Kwak [3] proposes an interface, which uses smart
devices to monitor and control of a pipeline type ultraviolet
sterilizer. T. Naheed [4] proposes an enhanced interpolation
error expansion technique, incorporating a genetic algorithm
that intelligently improves the embedding capacity reducing
the embedding distortion and improving watermark payload.
In [5] authors summarize the challenges among industry and
provides a new approach of Engineering Intelligence
Ecosystem that addresses current challenges of complex
engineering systems. Jihua Hu [6] develops a metadata-driven
framework of information resource management, based on
metadata and extensible Markup Language (XML) of railway
industry.
Even though today Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is
applied in a wide range of different areas, there are only a few
systems, which make use of case-based techniques for
network management in the industry domain. Due to this
increasing complexity and heterogeneity of networks and
services, many efforts have been made to develop
management intelligent techniques. This paper explores
intelligent agent architecture to make the argument for an
intelligent solution as opposed to traditional methods. The
objective is to improve the insight and understanding of
network management and present an alternative distributed
management network model. This study focuses on an
intelligent framework and an ontology language for
formalizing knowledge management descriptions and
combining them with existing management models. We
describe the design and implementation of a management
platform using Artificial Intelligent reasoning technique.
This work reviews the experimentations using intelligent
agents to solve the problems encountered by the classical
network management approaches. Then, we analyze the
current management models, their evolution, and applications.
Next, we examine the design and development of the
intelligent platform in a network to support industry services,
and a detailed description of the various modules. In the next

section experiments on the flexibility and robustness testing
are described briefly. Finally, we outline the conclusion and
future works.
II. INDUSTRY 4.0. NEW SERVICES AND HIGHER
PRODUCTIVITY
Industry 4.0 is known as the post information revolution,
was a brainchild of the German government and is defines like
the next phase in manufacturing [7]. Product, market and
technology cycles keep getting shorter. Manufacturing
companies are facing huge challenges. Across the globe,
initiatives such as Industry 4.0 and IoT are being driven by
fundamental challenges like reducing time-to-market,
enhancing flexibility, increasing efficiency, and quality, etc.,
which manufacturers have to dominated. There is an urgent
need to address new methods to support corporations in use
the IoT to solve long-standing industry specific challenges, as
can see in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Industry 4.0 abstraction layers
Although IoT is a mainstream technology in most of the
industries, it is not a new phenomenon. IoT describes a
network of everyday objects (or “things”) that have sensors,
controls, and network connectivity. When industrial companies
starting integration of physical management controls and the
connecting their Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition
(SCADA) systems to IP networks more than a decade ago,
they were moving into IoT. By connecting such things to IP
networks, enterprises can gather more data for advanced
analysis, impose more granular controls on business processes
and assets, and introduce and support new services for
customers. We found that 87% network management
professionals of enterprises, were providing connectivity to an
IoT initiative [8].
Industry 4.0 enables the digitalization and networking of
products, machines, processes and people with Information and
communications technology (ICT) systems along the entire
value chain. Integrating resources and processes across
efficient networks enables to connect industrial plants, assets to
improve the efficiency and sustainability of industrial systems.
In IoT a wide range of resources and services can constitute a
“thing”. Engineers might think of IoT as a collection of IP-
connected sensors, actuators, RTUs, etc. In this context, the
industry domain communications networks support a large
demand for services, for which the traditional models of
network management are inadequate. The management of the
resulting networks gets additional important and time-critical.

Real-time, intelligent, comprehensive networking of people,
machines, products and ICT systems throughout the entire
value creation process forms the core of Industry.
A. Industry Network Domain and Information Management
This network provides intelligent linkages between the
resources of the grid and participates in the decision-making
communication. The management of the network framework
is critically important. Traditional management frameworks
such us Telecommunications Management Network (TMN)
and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) are
capital approaches where a manager uses distributed agents to
collect management information. SNMP standards are defined
in a series of documents, called request for comments or RFCs
proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and
TMN is introduced by the ITU-T (the former CCITT). In the
public environment, a more heterogeneous mix of de facto
telecommunications industry standards has prevailed, with a
move toward TMN support. TMN was the first who started, as
part of its Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) program, the
development of the architecture for network management [9].
But these strategies have drawbacks, in particular, due to
the lack of extensibility and scalability on very large networks.
The management information models are abstractions of the
network resources and a key component of management
architecture. They define the structures and contents of
management information that the management functions act
upon [10]. A management information model provides a
common characterization of the network resources, enables
multiple management functions to interact with each other,
and supports different management functions. Management
information is exchanged among management systems where
management functions are implemented. Attaining
interoperability of network management systems and a
common view of managed resources in a managed network
environment requires that information models comply with
standard models. The management functions exchange
management information by means of techniques defined in
ITU-T X.700 [11]. These recommendations incorporate the
important object-oriented and manager/agent paradigms for
information modeling. The agents collect information about
the network node through their management information base
(MIB), which holds the management knowledge and a set of
variables pertinent to that particular node, as can see in Figure
2.
Figure 2. OSI & TMN manager/agent architecture
 The object-oriented approach for information exchange
allows for grouping of data and the executable operations to
be fully encapsulated into an object and object properties to be
extended through “inheritance.” The data can be manipulated
only via the access operations provided in the object. Managed
objects include their names, attributes, operations that can be
performed on attributes, notifications that objects can emit,
and actions descriptions of the objects. By using ontology
techniques any attribute, operation, notification, and behavior
exposed by managed objects, as well as inheritance and
containment relationships among managed objects and
managed object classes, can be defined.
In order to guarantee quality of service, the organizations
have to optimize performance, manage configuration and
faults and the system has to be kept secure. Intelligent network
control brings management savings by applying the
exceptional system expertise to communications lifecycle
management and its network resources. In a traditional
scenario network administrator covers the decision-making
processes. This change is eminent in the transition from
traditional, centralized control applications to an
interconnected, cooperative IoT model.
A home appliance network is a good example of a control
network. The control network is composed of a set of agents
that collectively control and monitor the environment for a
specific utility. In fact, thousands of control networks already
exist in everyday life in city lighting systems, switches,
sensors, electronic components, domestic appliances, and on
factory floors. Control networks vary enormously in their
complexity and in the number of nodes in the network.
Control networks have become a significant starting point of
what is sometimes called ubiquitous computing. Unlike
networks that people use to communicate with each other,
control networks tend to be invisible. As we have outlined
above, reliable and high-quality network connectivity is vital to
the success of any industrial service. Administrator plans
analyzes and responds to the management information that is
conveyed to the Network Operation Centre. Strong hierarchies
are broken in favor of meshed, networks and formerly passive
devices are replaced with “smart objects” that are network
enabled and can perform computer operations. To goal this
purpose this study address two types of network intelligence:
network coverage and network status.
III. MANAGEMENT SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE PARADIGM
In order to validate our approach, we have developed an
intelligent control architecture in an electric power system. The
generation shortfall and reliable access to electricity are still a
challenge facing the energy sector today. In many countries,
this shortfall is being addressed through investment in large
scale renewable energy sources plus significant growth in
distributed energy resources and other low carbon
technologies. However, this presents a number of challenges in
terms of grid management. Traditional models of network
distribution were predictable, and their design was based on
information from metering points, maximum demand indicator
readings and high voltage load data to meet the needs of
normal operation, fault conditions and abnormal operations.

However, the growth in renewable energy sources has resulted
in more active networks characterized by bi-directional power
flow, variable voltage profiles and less predictable loads and
fault current levels.
These active networks have different dynamics from
traditional passive networks, and require different information,
planning and management processes to ensure that the quality
of supply is maintained [12]. This is driving increasing
investment in automation and smart grid projects to provide
the network intelligence that companies need to actively
manage networks and improve quality of supply. One of the
biggest challenges for utilities developing more active
network management strategies is monitoring the “last mile”
of the distribution network, where much of the embedded
generation is being installed. Based on the present proposal we
describe the design and implementation of an integrated
intelligent management platform named OndiEXP, as can see
in next Figure.
Figure 3. OndiEXP Architecture
We study an example of alarm detection and intelligent
resolution of an incident concerning a private network. We
have used a telecommunications network that belongs to a
company in the electrical sector Sevillana-Endesa's (SE) a
Spanish power utility. The Spanish power grid company has
got a network using wireless on the regional high tension
power grid. Part of long-distance traffic in this net is
controlled by a wireless intelligent system distributed
throughout this private network. Increasingly, control
networks are being made from off-the-shelf hardware and
software components. In order to correctly configure and
provision machine to machine (M2M) devices (fixed or
mobile) to connect to the best network coverage available, it is
important the system be able to collect and analyze specific
intelligence about wireless networks resources. Network
coverage data includes properties like plants name, network
mode, geographic area, specific network technologies (e.g.,
2G, 3G, 4G), and even such data as Cell ID.
Communication between nodes in the control network is
peer-to-peer or master-slave. The nodes of the control
networks contain three processors in one: two dedicated to
moving data within the network and one for the specialized
program associated with that node. This modularity makes it
cheaper and faster to build new processors for control
networks. The use of integrating knowledge in agents can help
the system administrator in using the maximum capabilities of
the intelligent network management platform without having
to use another specification language to customize the
application. Fault identification involves testing the
hypothetical faulty components.
We describe an intelligent agent who processes
information collected by the agents and uses it to detect the
network anomalies that typically precede a fault. Intelligent
agents learn the normal behavior of each measurement
variable and combine the intelligent knowledge for the
management of the network resources. Repair is achieved by
performing intelligent corrective actions.
OndiEXP is a low voltage (LV) continuous monitoring
system, which measures, communicates and stores real-time
data and through analysis tools translates this into actionable
information. Previously the LV network has been all but
invisible in terms of system monitoring, with utilities reliant on
faults being reported to understand where issues are occurring
and with little or no visibility of ‘stress points’ at this level of
the network. This is where effective low voltage monitoring
can help. OndiEXP increases the visibility of the LV network
and allows distribution companies to rapidly, identify and
accurately locate faults so they can be quickly resolved. By
improving fault response and resolution time utilities can drive
improvements in service quality and increase customer
satisfaction. Using the information provided by the system
network operators can identify areas of stress on the network
and actively manage these fluctuations. Furthermore, analytics
currently in development will allow a level of fault prediction
that will help companies plan maintenance to prevent faults
happening in the first place.
The architecture of our system mainly includes three parts:
CBR, ontology knowledge base, and the intelligent user
interface.
A. Case Base Reasoning.
In this study, we used the CBR framework development
environments Jcolibri. The choice of CBR technique to
develop our system is due to the possibility of reducing the
time required to diagnose the causes of an incident, advising
the administrator on actions to take and therefore minimizing
the inconvenience caused by the failure of the network.
Jcolibri is conceived to help application designers to develop
and quickly prototype CBR systems [13]. Jcolibri is an object-
oriented framework in Java, along with a number of
supporting tools that is designed to facilitate the construction
of CBR systems. Jcolibri has been designed as a wide
spectrum framework able to support several types of CBR
systems from the simple approaches based on flat or simple
structures until the more complex Intensive Knowledge. Its
broad coverage of methods used in case-based
recommendation make jcolibri specially suited for building
this type of systems. A key feature of jcolibri authoring tools

is the use of templates. In order to facilitate the development
of systems, we have been investigating how to reuse templates
that abstract past CBR systems.
The management actions all rely on the elementary
tasks of monitoring the network's state reasoning about this
state and controlling the network. Monitoring provides
information about the state of the devices forming the
network. After information retrieval, reasoning takes place in
order to plan actions to be taken, e.g. for keeping a
connection's throughput at a desired level. The reasoning task
includes storing information for future use or learning about
the network's behavior. The system retrieves the closest-
matching cases stored in the case base. Reuse a complete
design, where case-based and slot-based adaptation can be
hooked, is provided. If appropriate, the validated solution is
added to the case for use in future problem solving. Check out
the proposed solution if necessary. Since the proposed result
could be inadequate, this process can correct the first proposed
solution. Retain the new solution as a part of a new case. This
process enables CBR to learn and create a new solution. The
solution is validated through feedback from the user or the
environment. Moreover, if the managed network's state has
been recognized as optimizeable, undesirable or even critical,
adequate control actions have to be taken in order to drive the
network back into a desired state.
Each of those elementary tasks may be automated up to a
certain degree. Objects are defined as computational entities
that encapsulate some state, are able to perform actions, or
methods in this state, and communicate by message passing.
The control Center process resources incidents without
spending a lot of time and energy on complex research
because the major part of the incidents has already been
reviewed for accuracy. When a service issue is identified, the
system provides specific instructions to short retrieval a
solution and work the issue through to its conclusion. The
system provides specific knowledge and allocation
information for each incident received.
B. Ontology Knowledge Representation.
Following these ideas, this paper proposes an ontology-
based approach to integrating IoT in troubleshooting. We make
sure the associate knowledge is being charged correctly for
services used. A common approach for knowledge
management is the abstraction of knowledge items to a
characterization by means of metadata descriptions, which are
used for further processing. However, this characterization is
not enough to guarantee unambiguous interpretation. One has
also to provide a formal model for restricting the possible
interpretations of metadata annotations. This aspect provides
the necessary shared conceptualization of the domain among
computer agents and users of the system so that a semantics-
based access to the knowledge items is possible.
For this purpose, we first develop a conceptual model that
differentiates between troubleshoot objects and troubleshoot
context. Next, to express this model we create an ontology
called OntodiEXP based on the pair Question/Anwers (QA)
answer model. Relying on the conceptual model we have
defined as well as this ontology, we identify and explicitly

specify relations between ontology classes. The Word Wide environment with efficient processing and communication
Web consortium (W3C) defines standards that can be used to available to the user by means of a simple, natural, and
design an ontology [14]. We wrote the description of these effortless human-system interaction.
classes and the properties in resource description framework
(RDF) semantic markup language. We choose Protégé as our
ontology editor, which supports knowledge acquisition and
knowledge base development [15]. It is a powerful
development and knowledge-modelling tool with an open
architecture. Protégé uses OWL and RDF as ontology language
to establish semantic relations. In Figure 4 we show a
screenshot of the Protégé editor with a part of the ontology's
class hierarchy. We integrated essential sources to the system
about technology resources like digital interfaces, advanced
analytics, data management, business imperatives, and
technology integration.

Figure 5. Graphical User interface

IV. TESTING AND ASSESSMENT SYSTEM.

System testing is a level where the complete and integrated
architecture is tested under certain conditions. In this section,
we will analyze the capacity of the system to offer different
functionalities. OndiEXP combines information from several
intelligent points and can identify and alarm for conditions
including blown fuses, broken conductors, under and over
voltage alerts and the location of LV faults. The system also
links the low voltage network information with geographic
network views through a distribution management system
providing fast and user-friendly identification of issues and
improve the operation of the network.
Figure 4. Class hierarchy for the OndiEXP ontology The following Figure 6, illustrates results collected as a part
of the experiment. We have analized the response time
Furthermore, the system maintains a complete database of question for ten agents related to network resources. This plot
your services, which is updated whenever a change is made. shows that OndiEXP speed improves proceeding time the
We know exactly what services each person is using and we traditional methods average.
assign every service to a person or location to ensure nothing is
missed. The system manages the entire add/delete process from
incident detection to the solution verification. The
communication module between the knowledge base and
application user was implemented in Java programming
language.
C. User Interface.
The advanced conversational user interface interacts with
the users to solve a query, defined as the set of questions
selected and answered by the user during the conversation. The
real way to get individualized interaction between a user and
OndiEXP is to present the user with a variety of options and to
let the user choose what is of interest at that specific time, as
we can see in Figure 5.
Figure 6. Performance OndiEXP & traditional methods.
A transformation algorithm to called the query
transformation agent capability and the intelligent agent of In our domain study , we can observe that the best final
information retrieval have been development. The system ranking was obtained for our prototype and an interesting
supports different users profiles, which makes it significantly improvement over the performance of others methods. The
simpler for the user to select the resources of a particular prototype performs regular audits to make sure that
environment: engineers, operators, plan managers, and measurable expected results agreed at the beginning of the
assistants. In the intelligent profile, users are surrounded by evaluation. The system defines specific performance metrics
smart interfaces merged, thus creating a computing-capable


and acceptable levels of network performance with respect to
these metrics, which includes service availability, latency,
throughput, and outage notification requirements [16].
OndiEXP performs satisfactorily with about a 93.9 % rate of
success in real cases. During the experimentation, heuristics
and measures that are commonly adopted in information
retrieval have been used. Statistical analysis has been done to
determine the importance values in the results. We may
conclude that OndiEXP speed improves the answer time and
the average of the traditional methods in this specific domain.
The results for OndiEXP are 33.7 % better than executing
time operatios/sec in the traditional methods.
Others advantages and benefits of the OndiEXP system:
- Synthesizes a discrete and reversible solution for
detected incidents, and automatically applies the solution
without the need for human intervention.
- Uses analytics to perform comparative analysis of the
broader endpoint to detect anomalies and eliminate false
positives.
- Delivers extensive reporting to provide critical insight to
incident and problem management activities.
- Dynamically learns and adapts to each organization’s
environment by collecting knowledge about past incidents in
the cases base.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In this rapidly growing and competitive industry, the
proliferation of the distributed control systems with active
elements connected through a network and field buses have
grown over. Enterprises should pursue an intelligent
management strategy, extending the existing tools to address
management needs. To improve the techniques of intelligent
management in a communications network, we propose the
possibility of integrating, normalizing, and distributing the
knowledge management within the actual definition of the
managed objects. Intelligent network control brings
companies bottom line savings by applying CBR expertise to
communications lifecycle management and service
management. We have investigated how the semantic
technologies can be used to provide additional semantics from
existing network resources.
We conclude pointing out an important aspect of the
obtained integration, OndiEXP platform streamlines the
knowledge retrieval process so the error solution process
understood and can be controlled. Furthermore, management
efforts are reduced, often very significantly, and a highly
technical complex function is being fully and easily managed
by a team of technicians. Longer-term savings are
accomplished by optimizing the operational support. Network
control also streamlines the process for ordering or
terminating services and circuits. The success of these
systems indicates that agent technologies can significantly
facilitate the building of hybrid intelligent systems with
ontologies.
Looking ahead, distribution networks will have to change
in order to meet new demands as growth in small scale and
intermittent generation continues and to accommodate the

resultant bi-directional power flows. Future trials should
assess the design and impact of distributed and self-managed
industry services that are able to automatically discover,
compose, and integrate heterogeneous components, able to
manage heterogeneous data/knowledge/intelligence sources,
able to create, deploy and exploit.
ACKNOWLEDMENT
The authors would also like to thank the backing of SIIAM
project (Ref. Number: TEC2013-40767-R), which is funded
by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain.
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