Marcel Tilly

A SOA-based architecture for empowering future collaborative cloud-based industrial automation

The last years we are witnessing of rapid advances in the industrial automation domain, mainly driven by business needs towards agility and supported by new disruptive technologies. Future factories will rely on multi-system interactions and collaborative cross-layer management and automation approaches. Such a factory, configured and managed from architectural and behavioural viewpoints, under the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm is virtualized by services exposed by its key components (both HW and SW). One of the main results of this virtualization is that the factory is transformed into a “cloud of services”, where dynamic resource allocation and interactions take place. This paper presents a view on such architecture, its specification, the main motivation and considerations, as well as the preliminary services it may need to support.

Service Selection Based on Non-functional Properties

Service-oriented Architecture supports software to be composed from services dynamically. Selecting and composing appropriate services according to business process, policies and non-functional constraints is an essential challenge. This paper proposes a method for automatic selection of the most relevant service for composition based on non-functional properties and the users context. In doing this we also propose a method of obtaining and evaluating non-functional aspects.

inContext: A Pervasive and Collaborative Working Environment for Emerging Team Forms

Participants in current team collaborations belong to different organizations, work on multiple objectives at the same time, and frequently change locations. They use different devices and infrastructures in collaboration processes that can last from a few hours to several years. All these factors pose new challenges to the development of collaborative working environments (CWEs). Existing CWEs are unable to support emerging teams because diverse collaboration services are not well integrated or adapting to the team context. We present the inContext approach to providing a novel pervasive CWE infrastructure for emerging team forms. inContext aggregates disparate collaboration services using Web services and Semantic Web technologies and provides a platform that captures diverse dynamic aspects of team collaborations. By utilizing runtime and historical context and interaction information, adaptation techniques can be deployed to cope with the changes of emerging teams.

The IMC-AESOP Architecture for Cloud-Based Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

A coherent architectural framework is needed to be able to cope with the imposed requirements and realise the vision for the industrial automation domain. Future factories will rely on multi-system interactions and collaborative cross-layer management and automation approaches. The service-oriented architecture paradigm empowered by virtualisation of resources acts as a lighthouse. More specifically by integrating Web services, Internet technologies, Cloud systems and the power of the Internet of Things, we can create a framework that has the possibility of empowering seamless integration and interaction among the heterogeneous stakeholders in the future industrial automation domain. We propose here a service architecture that attempts to cover the basic needs for monitoring, management, data handling, integration, etc., by taking into consideration the disruptive technologies and concepts that could empower future industrial systems.

Using task context to achieve effective information delivery

The use of task context to guide the delivery of information to knowledge workers is valuable for improving their efficiency and effectiveness. Moreover, the sharing of context between individuals can aid the sharing of knowledge. This paper describes research in the ACTIVE project which uses context to support information delivery and sharing. Machine intelligence techniques are used to learn the association between information objects and context; and to learn how to partition a users information objects into a set of contexts. Informal processes are also important to knowledge workers, and another research challenge is to understand how context influences the choice of steps in a process. Other research questions relate to the user interface for context-driven information delivery. Chief amongst these questions is whether the user wishes or needs to be aware of the concepts of context and process; or whether only the system should be aware.

Matching customer requests to service offerings in real-time

Classic request-response Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has reached a level of maturity where SOA inspired extensions are enabling new and creative domains like the Internet of Things, real-time business or real-time Web. These new domains impose new requirements on SOA, such as a huge data volume, mediation between various data structures and a large number of sources that need to be procured, processed and provided with almost zero latency. Service selection is one of the areas where decisions have to be made based on consumer requests and service offerings. Processing this data requires typical SOA behavior combined with more elaborate approaches to process large amounts of data with near-zero latency. The approach presented in this paper combines pub-sub approaches for processing service offerings and mediations with classical request-response SOA approaches for consumer requests facilitated by Complex Event Processing (CEP). This paper presents a novel approach for subscribing to dynamic service properties and receiving up-to-date information in real-time. Therefore, we are able to select services with near-zero latency since there is no need to pull for property values anymore. The paper shows how to map requests to streaming data, how to process and answer complex requests with low latency and how to enable real-time service selection.

Composition Context for Web Services Selection

Often there are several services providing similar functionality, moving the problem of selecting the most suitable to the forefront of interest. In this paper we consider the selection of services in a dynamic environment with changing requirements. In previous work we considered selecting services in isolation, here we present an enhancement to select services in their relation to each other to gain a global optimal solution which nevertheless respects local criteria. Novel contributions are the definition of a composition context and the global multi-criteria optimization mechanism.

Promising Technologies for SOA-Based Industrial Automation Systems

In the last years service-oriented architectures have been extensively used to enable seamless interaction and integration among the various heterogeneous systems and devices found in modern factories. The emerging Industrial Automation Systems are increasingly utilising them. In the cloud-based vision of IMC-AESOP such technologies take an even more key role as they empower the backbone of the new concepts and approaches under development. Here we report about the investigations and assessments performed to find answers to some of the major questions that arise as key when technologies have to be selected and used in an industrial context utilizing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based distributed large-scale process monitoring and control system. Aspects of integration, real-timeness, distributeness, event-based interaction, service-enablement, etc., are approached from different angles and some of the promising technologies are analysed and assessed.

Next Generation of Engineering Methods and Tools for SOA-Based Large-Scale and Distributed Process Applications

Engineering methods and tools are seen as key for designing, testing, deploying and operating future infrastructures. They accompany critical processes from ‘cradle-to-grave’. Here we provide an overview of the user and business requirements for engineering tools, including system development, modelling, visualisation, commissioning and change in an SOA engineering environment. An appraisal of existing engineering tools appropriate to IMC-AESOP, both commercial and development prototypes are presented, culminating in the presentation of tool cartography graphically, defining the impact of these tools within the enterprise and system lifecycle.

DiAl: distributed streaming analytics anywhere, anytime

Connected devices are expected to grow to 50 billion in 2020. Through our industrial partners and their use cases, we validated the importance of inflight data processing to produce results with low latency, in particular local and global data analytics capabilities. In order to cope with the scalability challenges posed by distributed streaming analytics scenarios, we propose two new technologies: (1) JStreams, a low footprint and efficient JavaScript complex event processing engine supporting local analytics on heterogeneous devices and (2) DiAlM, a distributed analytics management service that leverages cloud-edge evolving topologies. In the demonstration, based on a real manufacturing use case, we walk through a situation where operators supervise manufacturing equipment through global analytics, and drill down into alarm cases on the factory floor by locally inspecting the data generated by the manufacturing equipment.