SRS to Distribute Manufacturing Data Hedberg, Helu, and Newrock
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This publication is available free of charge from: https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AMS.300-2
2. General Description
This section of the SRS describes the general requirements that drive the design of the
software system. The goal is not to state specific requirements, but rather to provide context
to make those requirements easier to understand.
2.1 System Perspective
Distributing manufacturing data across an enterprise requires the curation and man-
agement of the data within a repository and end-user services to access the data. The
manufacturing data comes from a network of industrial equipment instrumented with sen-
sors and other data-acquisition devices. Without a data-distribution system, data users must
discover, curate, and integrate manufacturing data manually. The software system described
in this SRS can enable the automation of the required tasks.
This SRS describes a software system that is part of a larger manufacturing-monitoring
system. Figure 1 presents the architecture of the manufacturing-monitoring system. This
SRS covers the VDS and QDR applications contained in the internal and external data access
portions of the solution stack presented in Figure 1.
2.1.1 Volatile Data Stream
The VDS is an application that executes an MTConnect Agent, which is “a process
that implements the MTConnect HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol, Extensible
Markup Language (XML) generation, and MTConnect protocol” [1]. The VDS is a high
priority for the software system.
MTConnect is an open-source, read-only, extensible data-exchange standard for manu-
facturing and was originally designed to transform process-related information from propri-
etary to structured-XML formats accessible for monitoring applications [1]. The standard is
based on HTTP and provides information models and communication protocols to enhance
the data-acquisition capabilities of manufacturing equipment, systems, and applications and
enable a plug-and-play environment. Four information models are currently included in
MTConnect: Devices, Streams, Assets, and Errors. These models are the only established
common vocabulary and structure for manufacturing equipment data.
The VDS provides a means for streaming buffered data aggregated from the manufac-
turing devices registered in the system. The VDS must provide a report of all data items
available in the VDS, a near-real-time stream of most current value for each data item, and
a time series of most recent values collected for each data item available in the VDS buffer.
2.1.2 Query-able Data Repository
The QDR provides a means for transforming data into structured formats and sharing
this structured data with users. The data are organized using predefined templates encoded
in XML Schema Definition (XSD). These templates must be used to create data queries. The
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