Field Overlay Architecture for Manufacturing Systems

Efforts to effectively utilize field data in a wider area continue in the Held of manufacturing systems today. As part of these efforts, we focus on a computing environment for field devices, in which functionality can be flexibly expanded to effectively utilize data. However, there are several issues to be solved when new functionality is added to programs on various devices and multiple users operate the system concurrently. To solve these issues, we propose a computing environment for field devices called Field Overlay Architecture (FOA). The FOA provides a Common Computing Environment to be embedded on every device and an Overlay Management Framework for application environments. By the FOA, multiple users can operate their own applications on devices concurrently and independently. This paper describes the concept and mechanism of the FOA and a prototyped system based on the FOA.