A Real-Time Service-Oriented Architecture for Industrial Automation

Abstract

Industrial automation platforms are experiencing a paradigm shift. New technologies are making their way in the area, including embedded real-time systems, standard local area networks like Ethernet, Wi-Fi and ZigBee, IP-based communication protocols, standard service oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web services. An automation system will be composed of flexible autonomous components with plug & play functionality, self configuration and diagnostics, and autonomic local control that communicate through standard networking technologies. However, the introduction of these new technologies raises important problems that need to be properly solved, one of these being the need to support real-time and quality-of-service (QoS) for real-time applications. This paper describes a SOA enhanced with real-time capabilities for industrial automation. The proposed architecture allows for negotiation of the QoS requested by clients from Web services, and provides temporal encapsulation of individual activities. This way, it is possible to perform an a priori analysis of the temporal behavior of each service, and to avoid unwanted interference among them. After describing the architecture, experimental results gathered on a real implementation of the framework (which leverages a soft real-time scheduler for the Linux kernel) are presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The experiments were performed on simple case studies designed in the context of industrial automation applications

Analysing an Industrial Automation Pyramid for Small Scale Industries

“…2 Relay output from scanner 3 when any LPG sensor reaches alarm condition 60% LPG to gas ratio I0. 3 Relay output from scanner 1 when any LPG sensor reaches alarm condition 80% LPG to gas ratio I0. 4 Relay output from scanner 2 when any LPG sensor reaches alarm condition 80% LPG to gas ratio I0.…”

Modular software architecture for flexible reservation mechanisms on heterogeneous resources

“…It is worth to mention the architecture [11] developed in the context of the RI-MACS project for distributed real-time applications in the factory automation domain. The architecture relies on the capabilities of service-oriented infrastructures for providing discovery of resources and their real-time capabilities, self-configuration, fault-tolerance and scheduling parameters negotiation.…”

“…The application has been realized by exploiting the opensource multimedia library FFMPEG 11 , and the FRSH API described previously. The Video Client has been realized by using the VLC media player 12 .…”

“…The video grabbing rate was selected to be 30 frames per second (FPS) and the size of one frame was 320×240 pixels. 11 More information is available at: http://ffmpeg.org/. 12 The acquired video was encoded to an MPEG-4 stream with an h263 codec and a bitrate of 1 Mbit/s.…”

Real-Time Traffic over the Cognitive Packet Network

“…Furthermore, industrial distributed systems and industrial networks [13][14][15][16] are pushing the curve with respect to real-time communication needs. Real-time needs for enhanced reality and telepresence [17] are also creating specific needs in on-line QoS management for multimedia systems [18].…”