Study And Implementation On Agent Of Workshop Tier Network Management System

The workshop manufacture system of modern enterprises has reached a high level of automation, and both the quantity and variety of the field equipment and network is more than that of any historical period. Due to the variety and distributed trait of field equipment, enterprises rely on them tight, and it's required keeping the network and field equipment running reliably. A workshop tier network management system (WNMS) is essential to configuration and fault management of the network and field equipment. Facing the numerous field equipment of different intelligence, how to develop an agent, which can not only manage the local Ethernet equipment, but also the peripheral non-Ethernet equipment, is research hotspot and difficulty of WNMS.Via the discussion of the development and trend of workshop tier network and field equipment, it proposed two key points: Firstly, it's a trend of industrial control network to apply Ethernet technology to workshop tier network. Secondly, field equipment would be more intelligent and compatible to industrial Ethernet. Therefore, it's feasible to apply the computer network management technology to WNMS, and it also shows great foresight. Then, the technology of computer network management, especially for the agent is discussed.We develop the agent in the background of the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) of one enterprise. The MES cell controller is a DOS-based single board PC embedded system, and it can connect barcode scanner, RFID reader, photoelectric sensor, VGA display etc. It's a kind of typical field equipment, working in Ethernet, however, there's no SNMP network management function in it. For this cell controller and its peripheral equipment, the design of Management Information Base (MIB) is introduced, as well as the design of agent. We reformed the software architecture of cell controller, added SNMP agent function into it, made the cell controller and its peripheral equipment supporting the configuration and fault management of WNMS, and finally, enhanced the extensible and manageable ability of the former MES network.The system architecture of WNMS, especially the design and implementation of agent can also be reference to other workshop network management solution of Ethernet environment.