A Real-Time Service-Oriented Architecture for Industrial Automation

Industrial automation platforms are experiencing a paradigm shift. New technologies are making their way in the area, including embedded real-time systems, standard local area networks like Ethernet, Wi-Fi and ZigBee, IP-based communication protocols, standard service oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web services. An automation system will be composed of flexible autonomous components with plug & play functionality, self configuration and diagnostics, and autonomic local control that communicate through standard networking technologies. However, the introduction of these new technologies raises important problems that need to be properly solved, one of these being the need to support real-time and quality-of-service (QoS) for real-time applications. This paper describes a SOA enhanced with real-time capabilities for industrial automation. The proposed architecture allows for negotiation of the QoS requested by clients from Web services, and provides temporal encapsulation of individual activities. This way, it is possible to perform an a priori analysis of the temporal behavior of each service, and to avoid unwanted interference among them. After describing the architecture, experimental results gathered on a real implementation of the framework (which leverages a soft real-time scheduler for the Linux kernel) are presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The experiments were performed on simple case studies designed in the context of industrial automation applications

RI-MACS : an innovative approach for future automation systems

he European funded Radically Innovative Mechatronics and Advanced Control Systems (RI-MACS) research project was initiated to address some of the challenges in the future automation systems. Its mission is to bring the innovation offered by the Information Technology (IT) domain into the production life cycle, improving some of the existing inflexibilities in typical manufacturing automation plants. In this paper, some of the key aspects of automation systems engineering that require changes to ensure future competitiveness are highlighted. An overview of current approaches to automation are reviewed in relation to wired and wireless networking, automation architectures, and design environments