Machine ballets don´t need conductors: Towards scheduling-based service choreographies in a real-time SOA for industrial automation

Today´s manufacturing industry is under pressure to increase the flexibility of its factory lines. One approach to achieve this goal is the shift from centralized control systems towards distributed, service-oriented architectures (SOA). To fully leverage the benefit of this new paradigm, the SOA should extend down to the device level and even include resource-constrained devices, such as smart sensors and actuators. In this paper, we present our approach for a lightweight distributed service choreography without a central point of control. It is based on network-aware precalculation of a static, non-preemptive schedule for each device and is thus suitable even for constrained devices. In contrast to previous work, our focus lies on the planning components required for achieving a service choreography. Since scheduling is a central part of our architecture, and we expect it to be executed many times during the planning process, we evaluate different heuristics for this task.