Integration of heterogeneous engineering environments for the automation systems lifecycle

Production systems will become increasingly complex to handle flexible business processes and systems. Engineering systems and tools from several sources have to cooperate for building agile component-based systems. While there are approaches for the technical integration of component-based industrial automation systems, there is only little work on the effective and efficient integration of engineering tools and systems along the automation systems lifecycle. In this paper we introduce the concept of the ldquoautomation service busrdquo (ASB) based on technical and semantic integration concepts for general software engineering tools and systems. Based on real-world use cases from automation systems engineering we discuss the state of the art, innovation benefits and limitations of the ASB concept, and derive research issues for further work.