General concept

The user (1) prepares the configuration parameters (2), in the form of environment variables in the cloud context or as a JSON file in the on premise context, before starting the service. The parameters remain unchanged during the running of the service. After starting the Information Router service, the endpoints are available. The machine (3) sends a machine request (4) to the Information Router (5) service, i.e., the production machines initiates the communication. The Information Router service uses the authentication data received in the machine request to authenticate (6) the machine with Multitenant Access Control (MACMA) (7).

From that point, the execution can be synchronous or asynchronous, depending on the configuration. In case of asynchronous execution, Information Router immediately returns the response (8) to the machine with an indication of whether the authentication was successful or not. In case of a synchronous execution and a successful authentication, the response is returned to the machine at a later point.

After that, based on the configuration, the request (10) is forwarded to the external services (11). The external services are a range of modules with which the Information Router is set up to communicate with, e.g. Condition and Process Monitoring (CPM), Error Sequence Detection Module (ES) or Line Bottleneck Detection Module (LBDM). The module returns a response (12) which is returned to the machine in case of synchronous execution. During the whole process, log entries (13) are sent to a log aggregator in the cloud context or to the event logger service in the on- premise context. If enabled, incoming requests can be stored in the file system as text files in an on-premise scenario.