Industrial facilities are increasingly expected to operate autonomously, adapt to changing conditions, and support higher-level services without continuous human intervention. However, today, industrial autonomy is in an early stage of maturity, where the majority of operational plants still rely on hierarchical automation pyramid architectures and fragmented supervisory control systems that are largely operated manually. Open research gaps that hinder progress towards industrial autonomy include ambiguous conceptual foundations, as well as a lack of empirically validated architectural frameworks for increasingly autonomous industrial systems.

This doctoral research addresses these research gaps and studies how automation systems can be systematically transformed into autonomous cyber-physical systems. Thereby, the research investigates the theoretical foundations of system autonomy, develops architectural frameworks for the gradual transition towards autonomous systems, and provides empirical evidence of the feasibility of system autonomy by demonstrating and evaluating the contributions in a case study in a real-world industrial plant. As a result, the thesis provides a transferable blueprint for moving industrial autonomy from a conceptually underdefined research vision into a well-defined autonomy framework that enables its operational reality.

My name is Inga Miadowicz, and I work as a researcher at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in the Institute of Solar Research in Cologne, Germany. Within DLR, I serve as project lead, IT architect and developer for a project which aims to enable autonomous operation of concentrated solar thermal plants to improve efficiency, robustness and costs of the technology and seamlessly integrate them in broader industrial and thermochemical processes as a climate-neutral energy source. Since 2022, I have been pursuing a Ph.D. in the interdisciplinary field of solar energy and software technologies, focusing on conceptual foundations and architectural innovations to gradually evolve systems towards industrial autonomy. Prior to my doctoral research, I worked for almost a decade in the software industry as a lead developer, consultant and solution architect in the field of large scale, data intensive systems. Alongside my research and industry activities, I have been lecturing at the Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg (DHBW) University of Applied Sciences on distributed systems and advanced software engineering since 2018.