Plug-and-play like mechanisms in industrial device services: Master's thesis

The field of manufacturing is changing rapidly and the change is setting new requirements. Since the western countries can’t compete with price, they need to concentrate on the quality and special products. Products could be unique or manufactured in smaller batches that demands production lines to be extremely flexible and quickly reconfigurable for new product types. The goal of this Diploma Thesis was to study new configuration methods for plug-and-play- like intelligent devices in order to find new ways to improve the flexibility and reconfigurability of manufacturing. Characteristic for that kind of plug-and-play device is, for instance, the ability to self-configure, adapt environmental changes and provide diverse information of its states. In this Diploma Thesis, different ways to improve flexibility and plug-and-play behavior were studied from both the hardware and software points-of-view, and the software point-of-view was chosen. Several different types of middleware were studied and compared, and Devices Profile for Web Services was chosen to be implemented and tested, mostly because of its feature of dynamic discovery. An open source DPWS stack was implemented, together with the application code, and run on top of the FPGA platform and embedded operating system. The FPGA platform acted as a gateway between the internet and the wireless device and made the automatic configuration and communication between the wireless module and the other internet entity possible. As a result, the DPWS client server pair was made to communicate successfully according to the minimal specifications of DPWS and also other performance-related tests were successfully completed. The results can be used in future studies of the flexible connection between the network entities.