An Open Federated Architecture for the Laboratory of the Future

This project creates an open federated hardware/software architecture for the laboratory of the future using a novel system-of-systems (SoS) and microservice architecture approach, connecting scientific instruments, robot-controlled laboratories and edge/center computing/data resources to enable autonomous experiments, “self-driving” laboratories, smart manufacturing, and AI-driven design, discovery and evaluation. It positions ORNL for the future by building essential computer science research expertise, creating a federated One-ORNL hardware/software architecture, and defining an open architecture standard for the DOE and beyond. The project employs science use cases as design patterns that identify and abstract the involved hardware/software components and their interactions in terms of control, work and data flow. It creates an SoS architecture of the federated hardware/software ecosystem that clarifies terms, architectural elements, the interactions between them and compliance. It further designs a federated microservice architecture, mapping science use case design patterns to the SoS architecture with loosely coupled microservices, standardized interfaces and multi programming language support. The primary deliverable of this project is an INTERSECT Open Architecture Specification, containing the use case design pattern catalog, the federated SoS architecture specification and the federated microservice architecture specification.