Engineering of service-oriented automation systems: a survey
The evolution of manufacturing systems and the emergence of decentralized control require flexibility at various levels of their lifecycle. New emerging methods, such as multi-agent and service-oriented systems are major research topics in the sense of revitalizing the traditional production procedures. This paper takes an overview of the service-oriented approach in terms of platform and engineering tools, from the perspective of automation and production systems. From the basic foundation to the more complex interactions, service-oriented architectures and its implementation in form of web services provide diverse and quality proved features that are welcome to different states of the production systems' life-cycle. Key elements are the concepts of modelling and collaboration, which enhance the automatic binding and synchronization of individual low-value services to more complex and meaningful structures. Such interactions can be specified by Petri nets, a mathematically well founded tool with features that enhance towards the modelling of systems. The right application of different methodologies together should motivate the development of service-oriented manufacturing systems that embrace the vision of collaborative automation.
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Dear authors - are you planning to add the presentation of your paper?
First of all, thank you for your interest and reading the paper. Second, sorry for the late reply/participation since I had some work to do concerning with academic courses. The presentation is already available since last Sunday.
SoA-based automation is a relative new area (since the implementation and demonstration at the device level, from the Sirena project in 2005). Since then, diverse ideas and research is going on over the next step (the engineering, including modelling, semantic description, collaboration, ...). Take a look, for example, to the work of A. Colombo and J. Lastra, beside others.
There are already technological specification/implementation of modelling/execution languages (or more commonly orchestration & choreography, depending on the viewpoint) for Web Service (a SoA specification based on Web protocols), such as WS-BPEL (WS Business Process Execution Language) and WS-CDL (WS Choreography Description Language). But, originally, they are business oriented and not device oriented...
I will answer to your question and formulating another one: Basically yes, but do the current (engineering/modelling) protocols cover specific requirements of a collaborative SoA based automation?
Some requirements come from the nature of such systems: collaboration, event-based, integration of intelligent decision entities, flexible modelling techniques that permit the description of alternative paths, analysis, etc., and other that are device/hardware dependent (not covered here). Taking in account this points, we think that it is not an adequate approach using the business oriented languages in automation (I do not know the existence of such a work). Yes, you may do basic stuff with it, but it is requested a more flexible and unified methodology of modelling technique that considers the above requirements, beside others. Thus, we presented in the last part of our paper an informal approach with Petri Nets and exhibit some of the potential features.
Regards,
J. Marco Mendes
Thank you very much for your enlightening survey on the service oriented automation systems. As a co-chariman of this session, I would like to extend my warm welcome to you for participating in this conference. I hope you could submit your presentation as soon as possible.
You highlighted several protocols and you suggested future works on a basis for model representation and execution in SoA manufacturing that fits with collaborative automation is needed. Do you think the current protocols are sufficient to facilitate the future model for the representation of SoA that you have suggested?