Development of a MMS (Manufacturing Message Specification) Client Browser in Java/JNI Language

Abstract

In the two last decades, the manufacturing producers have faced essential productivity challenges. Product life cycles must be shortened, production lines must be optimized in term of stock levels and must be able to envolve quickly at a low cost to respond to market demand. This has an immediate impact on the design of process control architectures and consequently, on industrial networks. The Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP) architecture is a partial response to these needs and Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) is, in term of functionality, the main originality in MAP application protocol. The Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) is the main application protocol of the MAP communication standard architecture. MMS covers the most important functions needed in manufacturing applications. It was initially designed to rely on an ISO protocol stack, but the OSI layering allows to consider MMS by itself, independently of its standard profile. As Internet protocols are wide spread standards, trying to implement MMS over the TCP/IP stack is a practical and important issue. MMS is designed to support the interactions between heterogeneous industrial devices. It allows the standard definition of abstract virtual devices in term of data and services. Remote calls to a device service are performed through an encoding/transfer/decoding scheme that uses a unified transfer syntax. From a practical point of view, this leads to an open architecture, independent of the implementation of services in devices. From a more methodological point of view, MMS is a first step to the object oriented design of control process systems. In this project, I developed an original approach that tries to use the best features of the JAVA environment and the functional advantages of MMS standard. This solution uses the efficient JNI (Java Native Interface) Technology to perform MMS client-server interactions between a Java code and the MMS functions in C/C++ code.