Integration of a legacy automation system into a SOA for devices

Although networked embedded devices (NED) and service-oriented architectures (SOA) are often proclaimed as next generation technologies in industrial automation, there are some steps to take before they can be widely adopted. At the moment, productive systems are not SOA-ready and that is why integration approaches are interesting for manufacturers and operators of industrial plants. We suggest a solution for the integration of a legacy system into a so-called SOA for devices. Therefore, we use a thin abstraction layer which provides the technical functions of an industrial plant as re-usable services which can be arranged in control hierarchies and used as well in higher-level workflows. This enables a SOA-based automation with new control and monitoring approaches to be built upon the device services. To evaluate our solution a legacy material flow facility is used.