An active service-component architecture to enable self-awareness of evolving production systems

Production systems are typically long-living, interdisciplinary systems which undergo continuous evolution. However, especially in the industry of the production automation, any formalized documentation of evolutionary changes is often neither created nor adapted to the application. Accordingly, no knowledge artefacts exist that can be automatically processed in order to support the evolution process. Therefore, this paper proposes a software system which is capable to capture knowledge about the underlying production process. Based on so called “active service components” the corresponding software architecture enables the production system to acquire and keep knowledge about itself and to implement further functionalities based on this “self-awareness” in a uniform way. This is done by external behavior observation (without influencing any control code), which makes the architecture suitable for already existing plants in a non-invasive manner.