US Patent Issued to Illinois Tool Works on March 25 for "Open application interface for industrial equipment" (American, Chinese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,259,715, issued on March 25, was assigned to Illinois Tool Works Inc. (Glenview, Ill.).

"Open application interface for industrial equipment" was invented by Michael E. Donelan (Upton, Mass.), Linfeng Liu (Suzhou, China) and John Anthony Cronin (Franklin, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An open application protocol for industrial equipment is disclosed. Disclosed techniques include: opening a connection between (a) an open application associated with a manufacturing execution system and (b) an instance of a data sharing interface operating on an industrial machine used in a surface mounting process, the open application being confi...