Reusable and flexible design of communication gateways

Communication gateways have an indispensable role in the architecture of distributed automation systems. Numerous communication gateways have been implemented to address particular devices, data exchange requirements, programming languages, and communication protocols, and further will have to be implemented in the future. Typically, these communication gateways have been implemented from scratch; with little reuse being made, in terms of software reuse and knowledge reuse as well. In this paper, an approach is described to design communication gateways in a way to maximize the reuse even across different implementation technologies. This approach allows adapting communication gateways (instead of reprogramming them) in case of increasing requirements during operation.