Service-oriented communication architecture for automated manufacturing system integration

Abstract

The heterogeneity of industrial environments is one of the most important challenges in the context of automated manufacturing system integration. To realize common industrial messaging services, this study employs service-oriented philosophy to realize manufacturing message specification (MMS) services and proposes a new concept of MMS Web Services, which rediscovers the semantics of MMS. Then, this study presents manufacturing communication model based on MMS and Web Services and provides service-oriented communication architecture (SOCA). On the basis of describing MMS, a protocol data unit (PDU) design based on Web Services and VMD server message transmission interfaces, manufacturing communication subsystem using unified modeling language model is discussed in detail. In particular, to verify the validity of the proposed design method, a prototype system has been achieved. The resulting prototype proves the effectiveness of MMS standard, Web Services middleware and service-oriented concepts in the design of manufacturing communication architecture. The combination of MMS and Web Services can bring truly platform-independent and language-independent communication capability for automated manufacturing system and improve its flexibility, reconfigurability and interoperability. Furthermore, the proposed communication architecture can be seamlessly integrated into manufacturing control systems or management systems in plug-and-play fashion.

Keywords:

• SOCA
• System integration
• Manufacturing message specification
• Web services

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 60574054) and Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University, China. The authors would like to express their sincere appreciation to other working group members at the Institute of Production & Control Technique of Shanghai Jiaotong University for participating in the prototype system development. Lastly, the authors would like to thank the editor and the anonymous referees for their detailed and helpful comments to improve the quality of the paper.