Conventional industrial communication systems suffer from rigidness, inflexibility and lack of scalability. The environment is heterogeneous as the systems exchange data with a variety communication protocols, some of which are proprietary. This makes it laborious and expensive to reconfigure or upgrade the systems. As the solution, this article proposes a message-bus-based communication architecture to enable information exchange between systems regardless of their geographical location and position within the functional hierarchy of the plant. The architecture not only enables communication to cross the conventional physical borders but also provides scalability to growing data volumes and network sizes. As proofs of concept, the article presents a prototype in three environments: a copper smelter, a steel plant and a distillation column. The results suggest that the message-bus-based approach has potential to renew industrial communications, a core part of the fourth industrial revolution.

传统的工业通信系统受到僵化、不灵活和缺乏可扩展性的影响。由于系统使用各种通信协议交换数据，其中一些是专有的，因此环境是异构的。这使得重新配置或升级系统变得费力且昂贵。作为解决方案，本文提出了一种基于消息总线的通信架构，以实现系统之间的信息交换，而不管它们的地理位置和在工厂功能层级中的位置。该架构不仅使通信能够跨越传统的物理边界，而且还为不断增长的数据量和网络规模提供可扩展性。作为概念证明，本文展示了三种环境中的原型：铜冶炼厂、钢铁厂和蒸馏塔。