Manufacturing service bus: An implementation

We present the concept and implementation of a Manufacturing Service Bus (MSB, an application and adaptation of the service bus principle of the general IT domain to meet the more specific communication and integration requirements of manufacturing industry scenarios. The Manufacturing Service Bus is the communication middleware component of the Virtual Fort Knox (VFK), a federative cloud platform for manufacturing companies. Key requirement of VFK is the security of the component which is realized through security by design including encryption, authentication and authorization. The flexibility of the system is reached by providing numerous interfaces to existing communication protocols and the expandability with additional interfaces to upcoming communication protocols.