Design of a communication system for integration of industrial networks over public IP networks

The opportunity to integrate industrial automation applications from different cells over IP networks is a great advantage of such high level design over legacy proprietary data acquisition systems. The CyberOPC communication system is a research project in order to support and enhance all communications processes for manufacturing cells over Internet. That communication system was developed initially as variant of the OPC-XML data access specification with the aim to minimize the poll refresh time of the current OPC service communication system, simplify the Internet integration of low cost devices without the WebServices functionalities and provide CyberSecurity functionalities. We introduce in this work the CyberOPC communication system and propose the extension of the CyberOPC services with the device description services supported by an open and non-proprietary technology called Open-EDD with the goal to improve the integration and the process management of different shop floor distributed over public IP networks as Internet. The mains advantages of the proposed solution are: the performance of the CyberOPC Poll service; the simple integration with devices with the HTTP protocol support and the possibility to adopt the CyberOPC as transport system to manage remotely shop-floor services such as the device description service. The communication system proposed in this work represents an alternative technology for its performance and simplicity compared with the upcoming OPC-UA specification.