Patrik Spiess

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.

Integration of SOA-ready networked embedded devices in enterprise systems via a cross-layered web service infrastructure

Today manufacturers require efficient reaction to critical events occurring at the shop floor. Therefore, device-level data needs to be integrated into business processes in a standardized and flexible way to avoid time-consuming media breaks. Current approaches are characterized by a late indication of changes in the production environment and a delayed implementation of changed production plans. As a solution, we propose a web service-based integration of enterprise systems with shop-floor activities, using SOA-ready networked embedded devices. We examine the requirements for the integration and derive an appropriate architecture that tries to close the integration gap. The timely provision of data, the impact of device-level information on business processes, as well as the direct bidirectional communication with device-level services promotes the vision of adaptive manufacturing and leads to reduced production costs.

Decentralized enterprise systems: a multiplatform wireless sensor network approach

Massively deployed wireless sensor and actuator networks, co-existing with RFID technology, can bring clear benefits to large-scale enterprise systems, by delegating parts of the business functionality closer to the point of action. However, a major impediment in the integration process is represented by the variety of customized platforms and proprietary technologies. In this article, we present a three-layer, service-oriented architecture that accommodates different sensor platforms and exposes their functionality in a uniform way to the business application. Our work is motivated by real business cases from the oil and gas industry. In our implementation, we use three sensor platforms (particle, muNode, and Sindrion) integrated through the universal plug and play (UPnP) standard and incorporated into an enterprise software system. The practical tests and application trials confirm the feasibility of our solution but also reveal a number of challenges to be taken into account when deploying wireless sensor and actuator networks at industrial sites.

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.

Market-based prosumer participation in the smart grid

Energy management systems can help to minimize energy costs and reduce CO 2 emissions by making efficient use of renewable energy sources, some of which are naturally fluctuating (such as wind, solar power). At the same time, decentralized combined generation of electricity and heat from fossil fuels such as natural gas could increase CO 2 efficiency. However, decentralized generation and volatility of power supply require integrating the endpoints of power usage more tightly with the operation of distribution grids in order to keep up their stability. Endpoints mus be able to react to requests from the grid and adapt their power consumption or generation. Automated systems for interacting with the grid are necessary for adhering to real-time requirements and to handle the information load. This paper outlines the architecture for such an energy management system and describes an initial study that explores the potential of an office environment as a contributor to the smart grid. Our system is called OMELE: On-premise Metering Enabling Load-shedding and Efficiency.

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.

Towards business processes orchestrating the physical enterprise with wireless sensor networks

The industrial adoption of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is hampered by two main factors. First, there is a lack of integration of WSNs with business process modeling languages and back-ends. Second, programming WSNs is still challenging as it is mainly performed at the operating system level. To this end, we provide makeSense: a unified programming framework and a compilation chain that, from high-level business process specifications, generates code ready for deployment on WSN nodes.

Discovery and On-demand Provisioning of Real-World Web Services

The increasing usage of smart embedded devices is blurring the line between the virtual and real worlds. This creates new opportunities for applications to better integrate the real-world, providing services that are more diverse, highly dynamic and efficient. Service Oriented Architecture is on the verge of extending its applicability from the standard, corporate IT domain to the real-world devices. In such infrastructures, composed of a large number of resource-limited devices, the discovery of services and on demand provisioning of missing functionality is a challenge. This work proposes a process, its architecture and an implementation that enables developers and process designers to dynamically discover, use, and create running instances of real-world services in composite applications.

Decentralized Intelligence in Energy Efficient Power Systems

Power systems are increasingly built from distributed generation units and smart consumers that are able to react to grid conditions. Managing this large number of decentralized electricity sources and flexible loads represent a very huge optimization problem. Both from the regulatory and the computational perspective, no one central coordinator can optimize this overall system. Decentralized control mechanisms can, however, distribute the optimization task through price signals or market-based mechanisms. This chapter presents the concepts that enable a decentralized control of demand and supply while enhancing overall efficiency of the electricity system. It highlights both technological and business challenges that result from the realization of these concepts, and presents the state-of-the-art in the respective domains.

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.