Multi-protocol Communication Tool for Virtualized Cyber Manufacturing Systems

In service oriented manufacturing systems, entities (such as resources, people, products, orders) are considered as objects (actors, holons) that exchange messages to call the services they provide. Some services can be in the cloud while others are distributed on a wide range of manufacturing resources. This unifying paradigm hides the complexity of implementations, due to the various nature of the devices and their providers and also to legacy applications. In order to handle heterogeneous communications, we propose a practical solution for multi-protocol communication that fits to small manufacturing systems in order to improve their evolution. We present here a running implementation that is generic enough to be implemented in various service manufacturing systems. The solution is taking place in the evolution of the Sofal application.