Laying a basis for service systems in process control

To meet the flexibility demands introduced by modern markets, process plants have to become more flexible themselves. To tackle this issue and to ease vertical integration of IT-systems in enterprises a service-oriented approach is promising. Despite the developments concerning service-oriented architectures there is no standardized interface for service systems in process control systems. Therefore, in this paper we lay a basis for service systems in process control. We propose a message format and a way to describe services. We show which actions of a service interaction sequence have to be done in the engineering phase and which can be done at runtime. This is needed to meet non-functional requirements of control applications. The overall aim of the service system is to enhance flexibility without creating new dependencies.