  Today's customers are characterized by individual requirements that lead the
manufacturing industry to increased product variety and volume reduction.
Manufacturing systems and more specifically assembly systems (ASs) should allow
quick adaptation of manufacturing assets so as to respond to the evolving
market requirements that lead to mass customization. Meanwhile, the
manufacturing era is changing due to the fourth industrial revolution, i.e.,
Industry 4.0, that will change the traditional manufacturing environment to an
IoT-based one. In this context, this paper introduces the concept of
cyber-physical microservice in the Manufacturing and the ASs domain and
presents the Cyber-Physical microservice and IoT-based (CPuS-IoT) framework.
The CPuS-IoT framework exploits the benefits of the microservice architectural
style and the IoT technologies, but also utilizes the existing in this domain
huge investment based on traditional technologies, to support the life cycle of
evolvable ASs in the age of Industry 4.0. It provides a solid basis to capture
domain knowledge that is used by a model-driven engineering (MDE) approach to
semi-automate the development, evolution and operation of ASs, as well as, to
establish a common vocabulary for assembly system experts and IoT ones. The
CPuS-IoT approach and framework effectively combines MDE with IoT and the
microservice architectural paradigm. A case study for the assembly of an
everyday life product is adopted to demonstrate the approach even to
non-experts of this domain.
