Flexible collaboration and control of heterogeneous mechatronic devices and systems by means of an event-driven, SOA-based automation concept

The increasing demand in industry for flexible production solutions is a central topic of research. One possible way of increasing flexibility is the integration of Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) allowing a free configuration and a simplified composition of the required system functionality and enabling fast response to market demands, reduced production time and increased cost-effectiveness. However, current shop-floors often possess highly reactive and dynamic behavior. Therefore, the prevalent solution for such systems is to broaden the classical SoA-approach with features of an Event-Driven Architecture, which enhances the capabilities of devices to interpret events and to react on those according to predefined functionality. For this purpose, we applied a choreography engine to compose services without the need of an orchestration engine. The experimental set-up consists of several typical industrial devices like robots, gantries, conveyors, grippers, tools, pallets, sensors, safety guards and embedded controllers. Different application scenarios were chosen close to real-world situations familiar to typical production automation concepts.