Assessing Industrial Communication Protocols to Bridge the Gap between Machine Tools and Software Monitoring
Endika Tapia, Leonardo Sastoque-Pinilla, Unai Lopez-Novoa, Iñigo Bediaga, Norberto López de Lacalle- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Biochemistry
- Instrumentation
- Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Analytical Chemistry
Industrial communication protocols are protocols used to interconnect systems, interfaces, and machines in industrial environments. With the advent of hyper-connected factories, the role of these protocols is gaining relevance, as they enable the real-time acquisition of machine monitoring data, which can fuel real-time data analysis platforms that conduct tasks such as predictive maintenance. However, the effectiveness of these protocols is largely unknown and there is a lack of empirical evaluation which compares their performance. In this work, we evaluate OPC-UA, Modbus, and Ethernet/IP with three machine tools to assess their performance and their complexity of use from a software perspective. Our results show that Modbus provides the best latency figures and communication has different complexities depending on the used protocol, from the software perspective.