mINA-DL: A novel description language enabling dynamic reconfiguration in industrial automation

Production facilities have to cope with fast changing market demands-leading to a need for high adaptability of the manufacturing plant. Especially the manual adaption of the automation systems causes high costs and significant downtimes. Here, an approach for an automatic adaption of the automation system is presented. The major challenges for an automatic adaptability of the automation system are (i) dynamically modifiable networks, (ii) a real-time middleware transporting variables within the network independently of the automation topology, and (iii) a semantic-based mechanism that allows one plant module to identify which signals are needed from another module. This paper describes a real-time middleware for industrial automation (mINA). It focuses especially on problem (iii), the mechanism to discover and identify required process signals. The functionality is based on a newly defined description language (mINA-DL), i.e. the middleware can use further semantic information about the signals. The middleware (ii) communicates by means of a real-time publish/subscribe concept and provides OPC UA compliance which also allows an easy integration with the manufacturing execution system (MES). Furthermore, a first prototypical implementation of the middleware is described and assessed using a test environment.