A real-time messaging system for manufacturing environments

Communication systems, which are to be used in real-time distributed systems, must be designed with real-time constraints in mind. Thus, it becomes essential in our opinion, to provide a communication system that can guarantee these constraints. The architecture and the performance of this system are of paramount importance to efficient and reliable operation of integrated real-time environments. In this paper, we present a system for industrial automation and process control called MMS-ATM. Our architecture is based on the ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) protocol and the MMS (manufacturing message specification) application layer protocol. We discuss the implementation structure of MMS-ATM and evaluate the performance of this implementation.