Loosely-coupled automation systems using device-level SOA

This paper discusses software abstractions that facilitate the development of loosely-coupled automation systems, i.e. systems where elements can be easily added, removed, or replaced without needing widespread changes across the system. Event-oriented and service-oriented abstractions are explored as candidate approaches to provide loosely-coupled interactions and dynamic discovery. Ontologies and Semantic Web Services are proposed in order to facilitate the discovery and selection of automation elements without need for pre-programming. A demonstrator from the domain of automated assembly is used to illustrate the principles and show the feasibility of the approach.