Communication brokerage for a federated control environment

There is a trend among equipment builders to become more competitive by adding more and more features into their products. This process, which tremendously increases the complexity, is triggered by the aim to reach objectives like high reliability, speed and accuracy. In order to deal with this increasing complexity, SIMTech\´s manufacturing execution technology (MET) group has stated the objective to define methodologies and trajectories to describe and generate modules that can collaborate in a federated structure to become the archetype of tomorrow\´s equipment. In line with this, a research program has been started, which aims to deliver a platform for developing and deploying embedded control applications for a federated control environment. This platform is currently at the beginning stage of development, although a few key modules have already been completed or are close to completion, being a "communication broker" (ComBroker) and a "common device interface" (CDI). This paper focuses on the communication broker.