Social welfare has grown along with the developments of innovative technologies to ease manual work and provide affordable goods for everyone. Advances in science require time to reach practical use. However, when their impact is such as to reshape society, their industrial adoption is accelerated and they become part of modern history. The greatest milestones in the manufacturing domain are represented by the industrial revolutions, which offered an answer to the manufacturing requirements of their time and pushed humankind forward. Currently, at the dawn of the third industrial revolution, society demands products with the same quality and variety as those formerly produced by craftsmen, but now with the price, manufacturing time, and quantity for mass production.

As a response to the demand for the mass customization of products, the industry is leveraging the adoption of new technologies in order to upgrade its manufacturing processes. Although industrial production systems have been controlled through embed-ded systems for a long time, the key for disruptive changes came with the advent of digital communications, in what has been coined Internet of Things (IoT). The virtual management of devices has become more relevant, and added to the complexity of ma-chine’s behavior interdependence with the real physical process, it presents a new field of researched captured in the concept of Cyber-Physical System (CPS).

The addition of myriad of new devices with the presented capabilities paves the way to a new industrial revolution, denoted Industry 4.0. However, it will be a futile effort as current engineers lack the ability to manage a vast number of complex devices, handle the quantity of data provided, or use the information in advantageous business decisions. Manufacturing systems in a factory are controlled according to an automation architec-ture. Unfortunately, the current ISA-95 standard model adopted by the industry does not cope with modern requirements and constrains the adoption of recent technologies.

In this thesis, we explore solutions to the problem of management and integration of heterogeneous software systems, focused on production and grouped in dynamic System of Systems (SoS), framed in the context of Industry 4.0. This work presents an archi-tectural approach to distribute and automate the functionality concentrated in ISA-95 centralized systems into lines of autonomous production workstations on the shop floor. Our solution is based upon the workflow technology, which has been expanded to model and automate many business processes. Specifically, we target the use of manufacturing workflows implemented through microservices, to be provided by shop floor production equipment. As part of the solution, we have implemented two software systems to add support for workflows to a microservice architecture.