An Internet of Things Architecture for Lab-scale Prototypes of Real-Time Simulation

Recently, new technologies for data acquisition, storing and communication enabled to improve the performances of manufacturing systems with new production management and control policies. In the next years, we may expect several architectures exploiting data exchange between a real and a digital manufacturing system. This raises the issue on how to test the frameworks since the availability of real manufacturing systems to researchers is scarce or simply costly. In this work, we propose a novel architecture which is suitable for lab-scale models of manufacturing systems. The developed architecture has been successfully applied to a test case which will be used by an Italian SME as demonstrator for ERP software capabilities.