The application of service-oriented architectures in distributed automation systems

The complexity and scale of automation industry applications have increased substantially in recent years, posing new challenges to fulfill growing requirements for reusability, interoperability, flexibility and reconfigurability. The adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) could be a feasible solution to meeting these challenges. Based on a comparison between the conceptual frameworks of SOAs versus modern standards for distributed automation, a methodology is proposed for the application of SOAs in the distributed automation domain. The implementation of the Service-Oriented Architecture based PLC execution environment is demonstrated on a case study.