Abstract: As an alternative to an expensive bus system commonly utilized in multi-station automatically operating textile machines for exchange of data between a central control device and local control devices at the individual work stations, the present invention provides a central control device disposed on a traveling service unit which can be positioned sequentially at each work station, particularly in the course of a restart of the textile machine, for transmitting data between the central control device and the individual control device of each work station, e.g., for supplying control data to the work stations, for collecting event data, production data and yarn quality data from the work stations, and for assimilating the collected data when the service unit is positioned in front of a work station.