  The four Industry 4.0 design principles information transparency, technical
assistance, interconnection, and decentralized decisions pose challenges in
integrating information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT)
solutions in industrial systems. These different solutions have conflicting
requirements, making interfaces between them problematic for both systems and
organizations. An Industrial Business Process Twin (IBPT) entity, acting as an
intermediary between the realms of IT and OT, has been proposed in a previous
work, to effectively reduce the amount of required IT/OT interfaces in an
attempt of overcoming this situation. In this work, we investigate the effects
of this approach during the design phase. We argue that, by eliminating
potentially conflicting direct interfaces between IT and OT stakeholders within
the organizational structure, this approach effectively eliminates conflicting
communication channels within the system design. In order to verify our
argument, we develop a model of our IBPT concept according to the Reference
Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0) using an Industry 4.0 scenario
addressing the four essential Industry 4.0 design principles. Results show that
the IBPT approach indeed eliminates potentially conflicting IT/OT interfaces
during the system design phase.
