Web Services - Based Control Devices for Future Generation Distributed Automation Systems

The traditional manufacturing control systems are often lacking in terms of the capabilities of responsiveness, flexibility, robustness and re-configurability. To reduce cost and increase flexibility, a reconfigurable Component Based (CB) automation approach is proposed in this paper. The research work presented in this paper is focused on communicating embedded device based components using the application of Ethernet and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). This approach has the potential to give comparatively increased flexibility, and lower costs to manage and redesign individual components in comparison with traditional automation systems. A novel implementation of Web Services (WS) enabled automation using a component-based design approach for distributed peer to peer automation systems is outlined in this paper.