Classifying services for the automation environment

This article describes how the service-oriented approach could be adopted to the automation environment. The concept of services could be used to classify services of large, heterogeneous systems. One of the main aspects of services is the dynamic assignment and usage at runtime. Taking this into account, dynamic, flexible and scalable systems could be designed. It is shown how the hardware-related capabilities could be seen as a domain independent layer, which builds a solid basis for the class of domain services and how this helps to formalise their demands. Subtasks of the overall system could be encapsulated as service and - by defining interfaces - used independent of the realisation. Via the presented classification approach the architecture principle of services provides a mechanism to realise new, vertical integrated applications.