Towards flexible and secure end-to-end communication in industry 4.0

The digital transformation of industrial production is driven by the advance of cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) within which raw materials, machines and operations are interconnected to form a sophisticated network. Making such systems self-adaptable is a priority concern for the future implementation of Industry 4.0 application scenarios. In this position paper, we design a meta-model and use it as a tool to describe an end-to-end communication use case from an ongoing research project. Based on this use case we develop a business process performance and security trade-off model, which shows that maximazing both parameters at the same time is not possible, thus an efficient balance between them has to be achieved. Motivated by the result, we propose self adaptation as a solution towards a flexible and secure end-to-end communication in Industry 4.0. To identify and document the self-adaptation points in a structured methodological and lightweight way we use the bespoken meta-model.