A middleware for industry

Abstract

This paper describes an innovative distributed framework for monitoring and control of large-scale systems by integrating heterogeneous smart objects, the world of physical devices, sensors and actuators, legacy devices and sub-systems, cooperating to support holistic management [1]. Its featured Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) exposes objects’ capabilities by means of web services, thus supporting syntactic and semantic interoperability among different technologies, including SCADA systems [23]. Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN) devices and legacy subsystems cooperate while orchestrated by a manager in charge of enforcing a distributed logic. Particularly crafted for industrial networks are new middleware services such as dynamic spectrum management, distributed control logic, object virtualization, WSANs gateways, a SCADA gateway service, and data fusion transport capability. In addition, new application oriented objects such as shop floor, manufacturing line, welding station, robots, and cells have been introduced in the middleware. The combination of such objects and previous modules offers a new and flexible industry oriented middleware. A second contribution is in the form of traffic analysis conducted at the floor level. It shows the dominance of some end systems such as PLCs, the presence well behaved almost constant traffic made up of small packets.