rtSOA - A Data Driven, Real Time Service Oriented Architecture for Industrial Manufacturing

Summary

Manufacturing and industrial automation are under pressure from shortened product life-cycles and the demand for a shorter time to market in many areas. The next generation of manufacturing systems will therefore be built with flexibility and reconfiguration as a fundamental objective.

This change is eminent in the transition from traditional, centralized control applications to an interconencted, cooperative "Internet of Things" model. Strong hierarchies are broken in favor of meshed, networks and formerly passive devices are replaced with "smart objects" that are network enabled and can perform compute operations.

The software side has to match and leverage the changes in the hardware. Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are a well known concept from business computing to deal with flexibility and reconfiguration requirements in a loosely coupled manner. However, the common concepts of SOAs cannot be directly mapped to embedded networks and industrial control applications, because of the hard boundary conditions, such as limited resources and real-time requirements.

The rtSOA project brings both worlds together. Aimed at the lower layers of the automation pyramid, it focuses on the hard real time data streams encountered in control applications while briding the gap to event based communication in higher layers. A primary research goal thereby is the development of concepts for (semi-)automatic service composition to support flexibility in re-tooling and quick adaptation to failures in the automation chain. Smart but resource constrained sensors and actuators are directly integrated as first-class members in the SOA instead of being accessed through gateway or mediator.

People

Datasets

During the course of the rtSOA-project we generated a dataset with over 1.2 million solvable scheduling problems (c.f. the evaluation in our paper). This dataset can be downloaded here ca. 17 GB) and may be imported in PostgreSQL > 9.5. The download contains an importing script for Linux systems.

Publications

• Thomas Kothmayr, Alfons Kemper, Andreas Scholz, Jörg Heuer Instant Service Choreographies for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems - a Demonstrator Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA’16) September 2016
• Thomas Kothmayr, Alfons Kemper, Andreas Scholz and Jörg Heuer Schedule-based Service Choreographies for Real-Time Control Loops Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA’15) September 2015
• Thomas Kothmayr, Alfons Kemper, Andreas Scholz and Jörg Heuer Synthesizing Schedules Through Heuristics for Hard Real-Time Workflows Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Technology (ICIT’15) March 2015
• Thomas Kothmayr, Alfons Kemper, Andreas Scholz and Jörg Heuer Machine ballets don’t need conductors: Towards scheduling based service choreographies in a real-time SOA for industrial automation Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Service-Oriented Cyber-Physical Systems in Converging Networked Environments (SOCNE’14) September 2014
• Thomas Kothmayr, Jakob Hirscheider, Alfons Kemper, Andreas Scholz and Jörg Heuer Comparing Heuristics and Linear Programming Formulations for Scheduling of In-Tree Tasksets Proceedings of the 20th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS'14) April 2014