Extending Service-oriented Architectures in Manufacturing towards Fog and Edge Levels

摘要

The further development of today's manufacturing towards an autonomous and automated manufacturing environment has great basic requirements: adaptability of manufacturing equipment and networking, transparency of all systems and their connections, and also security and reliability in data processing and task fulfillment. Common established communication and integration architectures have their limits here. In the future, systems on the office and shop floor must be networked in a reconfigurable manner at any time, whereby logical processes, data formats, and sufficient time and reliability requirements must be implemented. One approach to the flexible linking of different systems is the redesign of current monoliths in production as reconfigurable service-oriented and event-driven architectures. In parallel to the pure reconfigurability, the introduction of Service-oriented Architectures (SoA) often also involves the integration of production systems in global environments such as a factory superordinate cloud, in order to increase transparency across a company. However, known SoA approaches do not meet the special protocol, behavior and reliability requirements of manufacturing environments at control and field level. This work presents the development of an extension of an existing event-driven SoA platform to realize locally deployable protocol-independent and portable communication and integration workflows at the edge of the manufacturing cloud.