A software framework for process control in the agroindustrial sector

Recent manufacturing systems introduce an ever increasing needs of flexibility and adaptability to cope with the changing requirements of the organization and of the customers. The continuous process of expansion, modification, revision, testing, and repairing is even exacerbated in small and medium-size firms, such as those operating in the agroindustrial sector in the Veneto region, where our center of research is located. The limited number of resources, indeed, prevent the possibility to use part of them for a research activity to setup a more efficient software infrastructure. Approaches promoting software reuse, such as developing a common framework and exploiting components-off-the-shelf, could potentially drastically reduce the development time and cost. The aim of this paper is to investigate how mainstream and advanced features of Internet Communications Engine (ICE), an object-oriented distributed middleware can be put at work to meet the requirements of novel manufacturing applications. We show that ICE properties and services can be relied upon to meet performance and functional requirements of agroindustrial manufacturing systems. The effectiveness and suitability for agroindustrial applications are tested by means of a software framework exploiting ICE service. A prototype application built based on the framework is described.