Along comes your supervisor, who connects his or her laptop either directly into the hub, via 802.11b, or maybe even remotely across the network. Your supervisor wants to know what machine tools are running and the status of each. Or, another device on the network is powered up for the control point to recognize. Note that as of today there are no templates or standards for how industrial machine tools will communicate data using UPnP. Templates are created by UPnP working committees, and a number of templates do exist. Invensys has approached the UPnP Forum to create an industrial working committee to define templates for factory and process plant usage.
Templates provide for interoperability of manufacturers of similar devices with control points.
You can still implement UPnP on the factory floor, but it will have to be without the comfort of a common standard of data identification. Circuit Cellar, the Magazine for Computer Applications. Posted with permission.