Software engineering in control using objects and services

The amount of hardware and especially software for systems in automation and control is still increasing. Faced with short product life cycles, the need for appropriate design methods for distributed real-time systems in this application field arises. In order to handle the complexity of software for automation systems of larger scale in manufacturing nowadays procedural-oriented and object-oriented methods are used. Within the latter alternative we developed an object- and service-oriented approach to cope with problems of complexity and to ease and accelerate the software design process. In this paper we present a service-based concept, give a possible definition of basic services and discuss experiences made in an application example of a three-fingered robot gripper