Enhancing traceability and industrial process automation through the VIRTUS middleware

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are considered a key instrument to improve efficiency and flexibility of industrial processes. This paper provides an experience report about the application of an ICT-based approach, derived from the Internet-of-Things (IoT) concept, to logistics in industrial manufacturing environments, aimed at enhancing awareness and control of logistic flows. The described solution performs assets management and inbound-outbound monitoring of goods by interconnecting business processes entities and devices providing physical-world data through an existing IoT-oriented middleware named VIRTUS. The VIRTUS Middleware, based on the open XMPP standard protocol and leveraging the OSGi framework, provides a scalable, agile, event-driven, network independent tool to manage an ecosystem of heterogeneous interconnected objects. The described solution has been validated within an actual industrial environment made of geographically-separated production plants.