Heterogeneous communication middleware for digital twin based cyber manufacturing systems

Abstract

Communication systems and networks are the backbone for manufacturing systems and IoT in Industry 4.0. In this context, the control software systems are made of scalable services that exchange through communication middlewares. Among them, the definition of the Digital Twin exhibits even more needs for heterogeneous communications, due to the various nature of the devices and their providers and also to legacy applications. The maintenance of such systems becomes tricky when the communication statements are widespreadly merged in the application code. In this paper we investigate the separation of the communication layer from other aspects of the application in order to improve the system evolution and make it adaptable and reconfigurable to different contexts (resources, workshop..). Various approaches are compared and a solution is exhibited with a first prototype.