Connecting industrial systems - solutions for high level development of software connectors

The implementation of communication protocols is an important development task that appears frequently in software projects. This article is a vision paper that describes the components of the current available implementation strategies and problems that arise. The article introduces the main existing protocol engineering techniques and puts them into the context of model driven software development. At the end a methodology is introduced for the automatic generation of manager interfaces of Device Agent protocols for the use in a distributed component oriented environment, using ASN.1 and SDL.