Domnic Savio

Interacting with the SOA-Based Internet of Things: Discovery, Query, Selection, and On-Demand Provisioning of Web Services

The increasing usage of smart embedded devices in business blurs the line between the virtual and real worlds. This creates new opportunities to build applications that better integrate real-time state of the physical world, and hence, provides enterprise services that are highly dynamic, more diverse, and efficient. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches traditionally used to couple functionality of heavyweight corporate IT systems, are becoming applicable to embedded real-world devices, i.e., objects of the physical world that feature embedded processing and communication. In such infrastructures, composed of large numbers of networked, resource-limited devices, the discovery of services and on-demand provisioning of missing functionality is a significant challenge. We propose a process and a suitable system architecture that enables developers and business process designers to dynamically query, select, and use running instances of real-world services (i.e., services running on physical devices) or even deploy new ones on-demand, all in the context of composite, real-world business applications.

Real-world Service Interaction with Enterprise Systems in Dynamic Manufacturing Environments

The factory of the future will be heavily based on internet and web technologies. A new generation of devices with embedded hardware and software will feature greatly improved storage, computing, and networking capabilities. This will lead to a system landscape of millions of networked devices that is heterogeneous with respect to functionality but features standard interfaces. This new breed of devices will not only be able to store and report information about themselves and their physical surroundings, but execute more computations and local logic. They will form collaborative peer-to-peer networks and also connect to central systems. By eliminating media breaks, e.g. by replacing manual data entry with a direct connection to devices, this “internet of things” will feature end-to-end connectivity, making the models of the real world, as they exist in business systems, follow reality more precisely and with shorter delay. This will change the way we design, deploy and use services at all layers of the system, be it the device, line, plant, or company level or even between collaborating organizations. This chapter describes an architecture for effective integration of the services from the internet of things with enterprise services. We describe the case of centrally managing a population of devices that are located at different sites, including dynamic discovery of devices and the services they offer, near real-time cross-site interaction, interaction with business processes and distributed system management.

Towards the Real-Time Enterprise: Service-based Integration of Heterogeneous SOA-ready Industrial Devices with Enterprise Applications

Abstract It is expected that millions of embedded devices and machines empowered with Internet technologies will be able to communicate, collaborate and offer their functionality as a service. At the shop floor, this creates new opportunities for more dynamic environments where timely usage of the monitoring information is coupled with control and in full collaboration with enterprise systems. We focus on demonstrating our efforts towards such cross-layer composition for the future service-enabled factory.

Web-service enabledwireless sensors in SOA environments

Enterprise applications support business activities in companies, so that they can manage complexity and be more effective. The service oriented architecture (SOA) concepts empower modern enterprises and provide them with flexibility and agility. These concepts nowadays expand towards the shop-floor activities, down to the device level. By implementing web services on the devices natively, we are able to push down at item level SOA concepts. In this work we focus on implementing web services on the SunSPOT wireless sensor nodes and coupling it with enterprise level services. The presented methods could be used as experimental platform to evaluate new SOA-based paradigm for factory automation and enterprise computing. The goal is to seamlessly integrate heterogeneous hardware on the shop floor and the business intelligence via the SOA approach.

Dynamically Optimized Production Planning Using Cross-Layer SOA

Responding to the dynamic requirements of the changing market and optimising costs are two challenges faced by corporate manufacturing plants globally. In order to be agile, modern manufacturing plants employ optimized supply chain mechanisms to reduce the response time of the market needs. However bringing changes to the shop floor after a production is planned is costly. In this paper we demonstrate how Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) driven approaches offer the flexibility to adapt manufacturing plants based on a dynamic production plan in close cooperation with a backend system. The methods discussed were deployed on a prototype test rig and integrated with SAP ERP. The results introduce dynamic behaviour of the production plan by adapting to the changing nature of the shop floor, and at the same time, providing the real time status of the machines to the enterprise services which optimize further the production plan dynamically.

A self-organizing and fault-tolerant wired peer-to-peer sensor network for textile applications

Textiles are omnipresent in everyday life. Their combination with microelectronics will lead to completely new applications, thus achieving elements of ambient intelligence. The integration of sensor or actuator networks, using fabrics with conductive fibres as a textile motherboard enable the fabrication of large active areas. In this paper we propose a smart textile based on a wired peer-to-peer network of simple information processing elements with integrated sensors or actuators. A self-organizing and fault-tolerant architecture is accomplished which detects the physical shape of the network. Routing paths are formed for data transmission, automatically circumventing defective or missing areas. The network architecture allows the smart textiles to be produced by reel-to-reel processes, cut into arbitrary shapes subsequently and implemented in systems at low installation costs. The possible applications are manifold, ranging from alarm systems to intelligent guidance systems, passenger recognition in car seats, air conditioning control in interior lining and smart wallpaper with software-defined light switches.

Predicting Energy Measurements of Service-Enabled Devices in the Future Smartgrid

In the future Internet of Things devices will generate massive amounts of data that will flow to enterprise systems and provide a timely view on the execution of business processes. Being able to estimate data generated by devices may have significant effects on planning and execution of business applications. We present some methodologies for mining data gathered from devices in the energy domain i.e. web service enabled smart meters and home appliances. We present here an approach that realise short-term prediction based on neural networks or support vector machines. We consider detailed information about energy consumption coming from service-enabled devices in the broader smart grid envisioned future infrastructure.

Reliable execution of business processes on dynamic networks of service-enabled devices

It is expected that future shop-floors will be populated by thousands of networked embedded devices. Those will not only communicate using IP (as in TCP/IP), but also feature some autonomy, allowing them to collaborate among themselves and with enterprise systems. As they can offer both their mechatronic and higher-level functions as a service and support dynamic deployment of new code, they can execute business logic locally, allowing for new classes of business processes that are executed collaboratively by back-end and embedded systems. While some parts of a process will still be executed in the data centre, the rest will execute directly on embedded devices on the shop-floor. Business Process execution will therefore be more dynamic and context-based.We introduce an approach to manage efficient business process execution over such highly dynamic infrastructures.

Reactive business processes for factory automation

Modern enterprises operate on a global scale and depend on complex business processes. Business continuity needs to be guaranteed, while changes at the shop floor should happen on-the-fly without stopping the production process. Unfortunately, the existing business processes found in most enterprises are not modular enough, nor they have dynamic support from the device level. However, as the number of sophisticated networked embedded devices in the shop-floor increases, SOA concepts can now be pushed down and provide a better collaboration between the business systems and the production line. This leads to highly dynamic systems that can adapt and optimize their behavior to achieve their goals. The work presented here shows directions to achieve this dynamism by means of simulation, state identification and close coupling of real world and business systems.