Shop-Floor Service Connector

Digitalization causes an intensive change in the way software components are developed within the shop floor. The blending of technology domains with current automation technologies leads to high integration efforts with a low degree of reusability. This problem is further reinforced by a diverging system understanding within individual domains and the use of heterogeneous development platforms. Existing solutions from the field of cloud computing are applied in the context of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, these systems do not fulfill the requirements of user-friendliness, resource demands, performance, and infrastructure, which is why they are only partially suitable for the current needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). For this purpose, the communication middleware Shop-Floor-Service-Connector (SFSC) is developed. Based on the broker-less messaging system ZeroMQ, an overlaid SFSC protocol is implemented. Subsequently, an example scenario is used to illustrate the usage of the system. Finally, the next steps for further developing the middleware are presented.