Shanghai Volkswagen (SVW) depends on production line applications to manage car manufacturing. Legacy DOS-based production line software performs real-time mission critical functions such as conveyor control, RFID scanning and bar-code reading. Production line systems are integrated with production management servers and control rooms via proprietary binary messaging protocols that are poorly supported.

SVW required Fusion Systems to provide a new implementation of the messaging protocols in use by the production control software that could be used in both .nt framework and Linux environments. Via these architectures SVW would be able to build new production applications without replacing the entire array of production line control systems. This approach permitted an incremental migration of the production line software environment from legacy technologies to current de facto standards.

During the first phase of the project, Fusion Systems consultants reversed engineered the messaging protocol in use and developed a new multi-threaded implementation with a documented API. Both C# APIs and C/C++ native APIs were developed. A multi-threaded DLL was provided for Windows platforms, and a shared object library for Linux platforms.

Extensive interoperability testing was performed in simulated, test and live production environments in order to ensure mission-critical levels of reliability and performance