A comprehensive study of industrial communication protocols and the development of a universal connection tool

This thesis investigates the challenges posed by protocol diversity in industrial environments and proposes a unified architectural solution to support standardized data acquisition across heterogeneous machines. The work is divided into two parts; the first part is a state-of-the-art review of industrial communication protocols. The second part is the framework design of the Universal Connection Tool with the implementation of a prototype. A total of twelve communication protocols, divided into three categories, were evaluated using a literature-driven, KPI-based framework. The findings reveal that while legacy protocols lack support for Industry 4.0 requirements, current protocols only partially meet these needs and often rely on external extensions. Future protocols show promising potential to address these gaps through native support for real-time, semantic, and interoperable communication. To ad-dress the integration challenge, a modular software prototype was developed using dual-layer architecture. A high-level model-driven abstraction and low-level ETL pipeline. The UCT was validated using both real and simulated data from GKN Aerospace, supporting protocol abstraction, metadata enrichment, and structured data storage. The results demonstrate that the UCT provides a scalable and traceable foundation for future industrial data platforms, confirming the feasibility of a protocol-agnostic connectivity layer aligned with Industry 4.0 objectives.