TCP/IP Manufacturing Applications : an experiment with MMS over RPC

The Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) is the main application protocol of the MAP communication standard architecture. MMS covers the most important functions needed in manufacturing applications. It was initially designed to rely on an ISO protocol stack, but the OSI layering allows to consider MMS by itself, independently of its standard profile. As Internet protocols are wide spread de facto standards, trying to implement MMS over the TCP/IP stack is a practical and important issue. We have developed an original approach that tries to use the best features of the TCP/IP environment and the functional advantages of MMS standard. This solution uses the efficient SUN Microsystem's RPC to perform MMS client-server interactions and the ASN1-BER transcoding to realize presentation layer functions. A prototype implementation is described. Open issues related to micro kernels and object oriented operating systems are introduced as future works.