Runtime integration of industrial automation system tools based on engineering service bus

Automation systems for large-scale industrial plants consist of a large variety of software tools, which should be seamlessly integrated during system runtime. Since the integration of such tools is a time-consuming and error-prone task due to manual setting and copying, an envisioned integration environment should cope with the design-time and configuration as well. This paper proposes the integration of automation system tools covering both the runtime and design-time, which satisfies a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The proposed solution is based on the design pattern for SOA called the enterprise service bus (ESB). The extensions and benefits of ESBs for industrial applications as well as their comparison with traditional multi-agent systems are discussed. The proposed approach utilizes the Engineering Service Bus (EngSB), which is an extended implementation of the ESB for facilitating the design of automation systems. The main contribution of the paper is the utilization of the EngSB concepts for the runtime integration of automation system tools.