Towards a time-constrained web service infrastructure for industrial automation

This paper suggests to seamlessly adopt a service-oriented architecture based on Web services throughout an industrial enterprise as a standardized, homogeneous communication backbone, from the business layer down to the manufacturing layer. Since manufacturing processes typically have time constraints, especially real-time constraints, particular attention has to be paid to the description of such time constraints within a Web service and the timely execution of time-constrained Web services within the proposed infrastructure. Furthermore, an outline of the time-constrained services (TiCS) framework - a framework which empowers automation engineers to develop, deploy, publish, compose and invoke time-constrained services - and a prototypical implementation of two main components of the TiCS framework, namely the TiCS Wizards and the TiCS Real-time Repository, are presented.