Design and implementation of an MMS environment on ISODE

Manufacturing message specification (MMS) is an ISO OSI application layer standard designed to support messaging communication to and from programmable manufacturing devices in computer-integrated manufacturing environment. This paper describes a non-proprietary MMS over TCP/IP solution known as an MMS Environment, The MMS Environment consists of an MMS communication systems, a set of MMS-Interface (MMS-I) application program interfaces and an MMS Gateway for integrating non-MMS-compatible manufacturing devices into the standard MMS communication environment. The capability and resources of the real devices were modeled as Virtual Manufacturing Devices. The MMS Environment is developed on ISO Development Environment (ISODE), a non-proprietary implementation of OSI upper layers over TCP/IP. This paper will also describe the implementation of the MMS Gateway and the modeling of a Programmable Logic Controller. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.