FeatherCast

Industrial IoT is made up of many different programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that communicate with often incompatible and proprietary data formats. Apache PLC4X standardizes access to these PLCs by creating a set of libraries across a variety of languages to read and write PLC data with a unified API. Unfortunately, developing and maintaining support for these different data formats, especially across multiple languages, can be burdensome. In this talk we discuss how we can describe PLC data using the open standard Data Format Description Language (DFDL), how Apache Daffodil uses these descriptions to transform data to a standard and easily consumable representation, and an approach to extend PLC4X to use Daffodil and DFDL descriptions to reduce the effort needed to support a variety of PLCs and languages.