A distributed transaction processing facility for the MMS specification

The manufacturing message specification (MMS) is an application service element of the manufacturing automation protocol (MAP) standardized by ISO to support messaging communication to and from programmable devices in a computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) environment. Although this MMS standard is designed to function in a distributed environment, its specification does not include a support to execute distributed transactions while these ones are mandatory for the CIM applications to support the manufacturing operations implemented by the distributed devices. We propose a distributed transaction processing facility that permits the organization of a distributed manufacturing process in terms of a set of MMS services encapsulated together to perform the manufacturing task. The facility is supported by the transaction processing (TP) standard, designed by the ISO, to guarantee the correct behavior of the distributed MMS transactions. This guarantee is based on the satisfaction of the atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) properties defined by the ISO.