Service-Oriented Infrastructure to Support the Deployment of Evolvable Production Systems

TLDR

Service‑oriented architecture is increasingly adopted across enterprises, and in industry the evolvable production system paradigm seeks guidelines for designing, operating, maintaining, and evolving industrial infrastructures, especially as smart devices raise lifecycle concerns that require devices to be easily reachable throughout deployment and monitoring. The study aims to develop a unified architectural solution that combines EPS and SOA to support all phases of a device’s lifecycle. The authors design a modular, adaptive infrastructure composed of specified components that interact and combine to meet system specificity and requirements, integrating EPS and SOA paradigms. The resulting modular, adaptive infrastructure forms a complete SOA ecosystem leveraging embedded device capabilities, and a proof‑of‑concept prototype deployed in a real industrial scenario demonstrates its effectiveness.

Abstract

Nowadays, Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is becoming a broadly deployed standard for business and enterprise integration. It continuously spreads across the diverse layers of the enterprise organization and disparate domains of application envisioning a unified communication solution. In the industrial domain, Evolvable Production System (EPS) paradigm focus on the identification of guidelines and solutions to support the design, operation, maintenance, and evolution of complete industrial infrastructures. Similarly to several other domains, the crescent ubiquity of smart devices is raising important lifecycle concerns such as device setup, control, management, supervision and diagnosis. From initial setup and deployment to system lifecycle monitoring and evolution, each device needs to be taken into account and easily reachable. The present work exploits the association of EPS and SOA paradigms in the pursuit of a common architectural solution to support the different phases of the device lifecycle. The result is a modular, adaptive and open infrastructure forming a complete SOA ecosystem that will make use of the embedded capabilities supported by the proposed device model. The infrastructure components are specified and it is shown how they can interact and be combined to adapt to current system specificity and requirements. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype deployed in a real industrial production scenario is also detailed and results are presented.