Secure Communication in Distributed Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

In today's world, communication security has a significant role due to the increasing number of distributed production system (DPS) realizations. As the basic characteristics of DPSs is the communication on the Internet, and during these transactions huge amount of extremely valuable technical data, and information (product, process data besides the business information) are moving among the members of the networks, the security has became a vital problem of this field. Typical representative of DPSs are the virtual enterprises (VE) as all functions of the production (planning and manufacturing) are present in them in a distributed form. This chapter introduces the main characteristics of VEs and some VE reference architectures. The chapter also describes the communication architectures and protocols VEs can use. The chapter also describes the hardware and software security methods, approaches, and tools that can be applied during the transfer of technical related data, information on the network, and on the computer while storing or handling the information. These approaches are general enough to be used in other cases, environments as well.