Interoperable Communication in Heterogeneous Industrial Environments: A Collaborative Robotics Scenario
摘要
The rise of innovative technologies that can be adopted in advanced manufacturing environments leads to industrial ecosystems where dissimilar devices and systems need to interact with each other to meet production objectives or evaluate the performance of the production activities. This paper introduces the complexity of the interoperability communication between diversified devices in productive environments which are composed of different production-oriented technologies, proposing an ad-hoc but smooth approach to provide a common communication architecture with a non-intrusive methodology between devices of rather different nature. To this end, the devices involved in such ecosystem and its corresponding role are analyzed, as well as the existing communication protocols, focusing on the more relevant standards used at industrial level. After evaluating the current interoperability problems between the different technologies, the proposed communication approach is based on a common information bus shared by the involved devices to exchange information through targeted messages following specific schemas depending on the shared data, becoming a light solution that can deployed in environments with heterogeneous technologies by performing subtle adaptations determined by each individual scenario.