Remote monitoring and control of a flexible manufacturing system through a service oriented architecture Subtitle as needed

The paper introduces a novel architecture used to remotely monitor and control a flexible manufacturing system. The architecture has been developed around the corner poles of a service oriented architecture and contains two main components: the OPC UA server and the web services. The OPC UA server has been developed through the use of a special adapter solution as migration strategy. Besides the basic data access specification, it includes both the alarm & events and the historical data and events specification, which are used to provide further functionality for the above lying web services. One of the main issues addressed in the paper is the usage of session management in the web service server in order to limit the number of UA connections and as a result to eliminate the unwanted delays. A total of eight basic web services have been defined which are capable of providing information to all levels of the automation pyramid. Finally we introduce and describe two test scenarios which present various facilities of the developed architecture.