Concepts of service-orientation for process control engineering

Abstract

Optimized production strategies require flexible and reusable system components and plant sections. To manage these requirements and to reduce the engineering effort new designs of control systems are needed. Service-orientation brings flexibility and dynamics to the control systems and seems to be a good approach for industrial automation. But, as a drawback, all involved components need to manage the different services, the system has to master the dynamic distribution of the services and the application functions have to handle the changing addresses. This work presents concepts by which applications could be built on top of a service-oriented middleware without the need to handle location addresses. Additionally, a migration path is presented for the access to a classical API-based implementation within the dynamic and flexible environment of a new process control middleware. For evaluation of the concepts a prototype was developed.