An approach for integrating real and virtual production automation devices applying the service-oriented architecture paradigm

Based on the integration of the service-oriented architecture (SoA) paradigm and existing 2D/3D based engineering systems, a new approach and corresponding tools for the design, development and application of modular virtual Web based production automation devices is presented in this paper. As apart of a 3D product lifecycle management (PLM) solution, Delmia automation was used to model the SoA environment, which brought the engineering of SoA to a complete workflow from the design of a product throughout the engineering of the production system. First developments have been applied to three pilot applications: a single virtual device, a mixed environment with one virtual and one real device, and finally an example of multiple virtual devices and instantiation on reusable components, thus showing that the initial requirements for the use of flexible reconfigurable devices in production are completely supported by the proposed approach.