Architecture for Data Acquisition in Research and Teaching Laboratories

In the recent years, several research activities focused on the design, development and deployment of software architectures addressed to the monitoring, management and control of industrial plants, since the ongoing digitalisation of manufacturing companies demanded guidelines and cutting-edge solutions to the research community. In this context, more and more research centres' laboratories have been hence asked to run in parallel different architectures, relying on different research activities, whose feeds consist of the same signals from the machine pool. When these laboratories belong to universities, the request for data from students and trainees is added to the request for data from research activities. this often results in a network congestion with severe implications on the data integrity. For this reason, the authors have designed and implemented an open modular software architecture able to minimise the requests to the machines and to embody Service Oriented Architecture functionalities. The architecture has been named SHIELD, indeed SHIELD Has Integrated Existing Laboratory Data.