The automation industry is currently in the process of transforming towards Industrie 4.0. To fully leverage the new possibilities, e.g. predictive maintenance, systems from all levels of the AT-pyramid are required to be fully connected. For this purpose there exist abstract models as well as concrete implementations of middleware-based interconnection platforms. This paper aims to close the gap between abstract concepts and concrete implementations by comparing technological concepts for a middleware implementation. At first, requirements are determined which should be fulfilled by a middleware to be comprehensible and competitive. Based on these requirements, six different middleware technologies are presented and evaluated. The evaluation yields that both, OPC UA Pub/Sub with AMQP/MQTT as transport and DDS suit the requirements best. However, there are no complete implementations of OPC UA Pub/Sub with AMQP/MQTT as transport available yet. Therefore DDS is chosen for a prototypical middleware implementation. The prototype is tested and shows to fulfill all except one requirements, namely real-time constraints. As a conclusion it is recorded that for future middleware implementations OPC UA Pub/Sub (as soon as complete implementations are available) and DDS are the most appropriate technologies.     «

The automation industry is currently in the process of transforming towards Industrie 4.0. To fully leverage the new possibilities, e.g. predictive maintenance, systems from all levels of the AT-pyramid are required to be fully connected. For this purpose there exist abstract models as well as concrete implementations of middleware-based interconnection platforms. This paper aims to close the gap between abstract concepts and concrete implementations by comparing technological concepts for a mi...     »