Integração de sistemas de automação industrial através do protocolo de comunicação Modbus, no contexto da Indústria 4.0

Abstract

With growing competitiveness in the industry sector, in 2011, Germany presented a new concept of Industry, with objectives of increasing productivity and quality and reducing production costs. This concept became known as Industry 4.0 and quickly became popular around the world. This concept is strongly linked to the integration of technologies, especially those related to information technologies. One of the main points of attention when implementing this concept in systems that already operate is related to the difficulty in integrating different devices, this problem is accentuated in cases of legacy equipment, which in many cases have a few decades of use. In this context, this work aims to verify the applicability of the use of the Modbus protocol, a communication protocol very popular in the industry since the mid-1980s, to assist the integration between legacy systems with architectures compatible with the Industry 4.0 concept. The objective is to develop software capable of integrating machines and equipment that only have the possibility of communicating with the Modbus protocol, só that information from them can be accessed, making them compatible with the concepts of Industry 4.0. A DashBoard prototype for monitoring a production line was developed, and interfaced with a physical device that can be activated by the production line operator, through buttons and sensors. Thus, from this prototype it was possible to observe that the proposed solution meets the preliminary expectations, showing that it is feasible to use the Modbus protocol to interface automation systems in an Industry 4.0 context.