The implementation of Web serviceenabled sensors and actuators on production lines will permanently change the way in which future automation systems are designed and implemented. Current interfaces to automation components are largely vendor-specific, restricting the reconfiguration of lines and the management of line data across enterprises. Outside the automation domain, enterprise system development has seen real-time data linkage take great steps in the office, warehouse and supply chain. Research into the use of Web-service-enabled sensors and actuators has the potential to present an open standards-based method to integrate production lines into this enterprise computing model, an innovation that will revolutionize automation in future manufacturing plants and remove control from vendors back to users.

The factory automation community is looking toward the devices profile for Web services (DPWS) set of Web service standards to provide a service orientated architecture (SOA) enablement of factory elements. This paper examines the issues surrounding the application and future development of DPWS on production line machines and their integration with distributed enterprise applications. Issues raised reflect the need for more development on defining a generic approach to Web Service architecture in automation and the ontologies that support it. The concept of an automation lifecycle is introduced to aid this development from a more holistic perspective.

This paper outlines opportunities and challenges in the development of next-generation embedded devices, applications, and services, resulting from their increasing intelligence - it plots envisioned future directions for intelligent device networking based on service-oriented high-level protocols, in particular as regards the industrial automation sector - and outlines the approach adopted by the Service Infrastructure for Real-Time Embedded Networked Applications project, as well as the business advantages this approach is expected to provide.

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

This paper outlines the benefits of adopting service-oriented architectures at the level of communications between resource-constrained embedded devices, in particular for industrial device networks. It focuses on the usage of the devices profile for Web services as the underpinning of such "smart device" architectures and discusses an early implementation thereof. It further illustrates how "dumb " or "legacy" devices can be integrated using a gatewaying approach.

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.

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 - it describes the approach adopted by the SIRENA project, as well as the business advantages it is expected to provide - and outlines early experimental results.