About the Applicability of IoT Concept for Classical Manufacturing Systems

摘要

This paper discusses about introducing IoT principles into manufacturing systems so that different devices expose their state and talk to each other. The IoT device protocol, including published events and received commands, was adapted for various manufacturing equipment. Thus, through a cloud application, the event published by a device is converted to a command toward other devices, and the receiver is able to interpret the message as a command or an event. The proposed experiment involves disabling the local I/O interaction among devices and the use of an IoT messaging solution through cloud. One concern of IoT applicability in production systems regards the delay measurement of a round trip message. Our experiments revealed that such delays are mainly produced by the external interaction protocols, as these are provided by manufacturers of devices. Though this weakness exists, the advantage of the IoT concept can be underlined: collaboration among IoT devices is allowed without the need to extend the hardware configuration. This approach is suitable to smoothly enlarge classical manufacturing systems with new equipment and functionalities.