Jose L. Martinez Lastra

Semantic web services in factory automation: fundamental insights and research roadmap

One of the significant challenges for current and future manufacturing systems is that of providing rapid reconfigurability in order to evolve and adapt to mass customization. This challenge is aggravated if new types of processes and components are introduced, as existing components are expected to interact with the novel entities but have no previous knowledge on how to collaborate. This statement not only applies to innovative processes and devices, but is also due to the impossibility to incorporate knowledge in a single device about all types of available system components. This paper proposes the use of Semantic Web Services in order to overcome this challenge. The use of ontologies and explicit semantics enable performing logical reasoning to infer sufficient knowledge on the classification of processes that machines offer, and on how to execute and compose those processes to carry out manufacturing orchestration autonomously. A series of motivating utilization scenarios are illustrated, and a research roadmap is presented.

Industrial Cloud-Based Cyber-Physical Systems: The IMC-AESOP Approach

This book presents cutting-edge emerging technologies and approaches in the areas of service-oriented architectures, intelligent devices and cloud-based cyber-physical systems. It provides a clear view on their applicability to the management and automation of manufacturing and process industries. It offers a holistic view of future industrial cyber-physical systems and their industrial usage and also depicts technologies and architectures as well as a migration approach and engineering tools based on these. By providing a careful balance between the theory and the practical aspects, this book has been authored by several experts from academia and industry, thereby offering a valuable understanding of the vision, the domain, the processes and the results of the research. It has several illustrations and tables to clearly exemplify the concepts and results examined in the text and these are supported by four real-life case-studies. We are witnessing rapid advances in the industrial automation, mainly driven by business needs towards agility and supported by new disruptive advances both on the software and hardware side, as well as the cross-fertilization of concepts and the amalgamation of information and communication technology-driven approaches in traditional industrial automation and control systems. This book is intended for technology managers, application designers, solution developers, engineers working in industry, as well as researchers, undergraduate and graduate students of industrial automation, industrial informatics and production engineering.

OOONEIDA: an open, object-oriented knowledge economy for intelligent distributed automation

OOONEIDA is a new initiative for enabling decentralized, agile industrial control and automation in discrete manufacturing and continuous process systems. The goal of the OOONEIDA project is the creation of the technological infrastructure for a new, open knowledge economy for automation components and automated industrial products. This will be done by further development of the concept of reusable portable software modules (function blocks), and by their application in the time- and cost-effective specification, design, validation, realization and deployment of intelligent mechatronic components in distributed industrial automation and control systems.

Orchestration of service-oriented manufacturing processes

This paper outlines the perspectives opened by the application of the service-orientation paradigm for realizing high-level communications between next-generation, increasingly intelligent embedded devices - it indicates how this approach can benefit the manufacturing industry - and outlines the issues and approaches for cohesively coordinating manufacturing services at various levels of the manufacturing device hierarchy

OOONEIDA: an open, object-oriented knowledge economy for intelligent industrial automation

Open knowledge economy in intelligent industrial automation (OOONEIDA) is a new initiative for enabling decentralized, reconfigurable industrial control and automation in discrete manufacturing and continuous process systems. The goal of the OOONEIDA project is the creation of the technological infrastructure for a new, open knowledge economy for automation components and automated industrial products. This will be done by further development of the concept of reusable portable software modules (function blocks) and by their application in the time- and cost-effective specification, design, validation, realization, and deployment of intelligent mechatronic components in distributed industrial automation and control systems.

Service-oriented architectures for collaborative automation

This paper describes a vision for utilising service-oriented architectures (SOA) to support the lifecycle needs of automation systems in the context of agile manufacturing, i.e., engineering easily configurable manufacturing systems composed of standard components that may be remotely supported by geographically distributed engineering partners to suit changing and unpredictable business needs. The paper briefly reviews the relevant state of the art in collaborative automation systems and considers the potential of SOA to support the practical implementation of such systems, with traditional product-oriented methods replaced by more service-oriented ways of working. As the SOA paradigm holds the promise of being applicable across the entire spectrum of manufacturing systems and devices, down to sensors and actuators, the paper further addresses issues involved in discovery and orchestration of device-level services and discusses the potential benefits of using semantic Web techniques for automating service selection, invocation and composition, so as to facilitate rapid reconfiguration. This discussion is supported by a practical example of device-level SOA.

Service-Oriented Architecture for Distributed Publish/Subscribe Middleware in Electronics Production

The Computer Aided Manufacturing using XML (CAMX) framework enables integrating electronics production systems using message-oriented middleware, offering standards-based communication among machines and control software applications. CAMX frameworks implement publish/subscribe of XML messages through an entity called the message broker (MSB), which provides the messaging service using a web-based interface. A challenge for MSB-based systems is that they must scale to handle large volumes of messaging traffic, which is a characteristic of modern information-intensive manufacturing systems. This paper first tackles this challenge by presenting an array of architecture patterns for creating distributed MSB frameworks, focusing mainly on globally distributed federations and locally distributed clusters. A unified architecture is subsequently presented that leverages the different patterns by combining federated frameworks with locally distributed clusters into a unified set of architecture elements and interactions. A service-oriented approach is followed to provide a uniform interface for distributed MSB elements, whether federated or locally distributed. The service-oriented approach is also used to dynamically discover resources and automatically invoke the (re)configuration and messaging services. The services are enriched with semantics in order to facilitate automatic discovery and selection of services using the semantic web services formal ontology. Semantic service advertisements are propagated using a peer-to-peer discovery protocol. The approach presented in this paper is not limited to the CAMX case and is generally applicable to distributed event-based manufacturing systems

An IEC 61499 application generator for scan-based industrial controllers

In order to cope with todays market uncertainties, manufacturing is required to rapidly adapt and react to changes and unpredictable scenarios. These are currently among the main research and development topics in order to reveal new approaches and methodologies to achieve these goals. The Industrial Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) created the IEC 61499 (function block) standard. This standard proposes an open architecture for distributed industrial-process measurement and control systems (IPMCS). The IEC 61499 defines the basic concepts and methodology for the design of modular reusable distributable systems, and paves the way for the new reconfigurable and flexible manufacturing. This paper presents the development of a software tool (IEC 61499 application generator) that enables the deployment of IEC 61499 applications to scan-based embedded controllers. However, the IEC 61499 standard foundations rely on an event-based model. The paper describes an approach to implement an event-based architecture on a scan-based industrial controller.

Loosely-coupled Automation Systems using Device-level SOA

This paper discusses software abstractions that facilitate the development of loosely-coupled automation systems, i.e. systems where elements can be easily added, removed, or replaced without needing widespread changes across the system. Event-oriented and service-oriented abstractions are explored as candidate approaches to provide loosely-coupled interactions and dynamic discovery. Ontologies and semantic Web services are proposed in order to facilitate the discovery and selection of automation elements without need for pre-programming. A demonstrator from the domain of automated assembly is used to illustrate the principles and show the feasibility of the approach.

Formal validation of intelligent-automated production systems: towards industrial applications

This paper introduces a framework for formal modelling and validation of automation systems destined to be used directly by control engineers. The framework is based on a modelling formalism of Net Condition/Event Systems (NCES), which is graphical, modular and typed. This allows for the modelling of realistic hierarchically organised automation systems in a closed plant-controller loop. The framework consists of methodologies and tools, which enable formal analysis of automation systems. The framework is to be used for the improvement of safety characteristics, reliability and robustness of such systems by means of prediction of potential faults and deadlocks.