Service-oriented architecture and technologies for automating integration of manufacturing systems and services

Enterprise application integration (EAI) has been pursued strenuously by researchers and industrial practitioners for decades. With the advent of Web Services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), realizing enterprise integration, even automating inter-enterprise interactions become feasible. Virtualization is the fundamental for implementing an SOA based on Web Service technologies. In this paper, we first review the Web Service-Resource Framework (WS-RF) with emphasis on the concepts of Web Services and stateful resource modeling. Then we outline a Service-Oriented architecture that shows how various types of manufacturing resources are virtualized as Web Services; what technologies are used in Web Services register, discovery and transport, and in business process automation. We adopt the WS-Resource approach, for illustration purpose, to virtualize a category of resource-Automatic Guided Vehicle (AGV). Different projections are defined based on WS-Resource properties upon virtualization so as to offer different perspectives to the same resources to meet a variety of business requirements.