Enhancing Device Exchange Agility in Service-oriented Industrial Automation

The industrial automation domain is known for its plethora of heterogeneous equipment encompassing distinct functions, form factors, network interfaces and I/O specifications supported by dissimilar software and hardware platforms. There is then an evident and crescent need to take every device into account and improve the agility performance when handling device breakdowns or lifecycle modifications. Emerging from higher level IT domain, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is currently a widely endorsed approach for both business and enterprise systems integration. SOA promotes discoverability, loose coupling, abstraction, autonomy and composition of services relying on open web standards - features that can provide an important contribution to the industrial automation domain. The present work implements a SOA-based infrastructure comprising Semantic Web concepts to enhance the process of exchanging a device in an industrial automation environment by assisting (and even automate) this task supported by service and device semantic matching whenever a device breaks down or needs to be replaced. The infrastructure was implemented and tested in an educational shop floor setup composed by a set of distributed entities each one managed and controlled by its own SOA-ready PLC. The performed tests revealed that the tasks of discovering and identifying new devices, as well as providing assistance when a device is down or disconnected offered a valuable contribution and it can increase the agility of the overall system when dealing with operation disruptions or modifications at device level.