Leveraging OSGi and Eclipse technologies for a service oriented middleware in industrial machines

Eclipse technologies are widely used for desktop and even enterprise solutions. In contrast, the use of Eclipse technologies in automation is less common. Together with our customer, we have developed a service oriented middleware based on OSGi and Eclipse for loosely coupling real-time control software with machine and process visualization applications. We will show the requirements steering us towards these technologies and will elaborate on design, implementation and deployment. The insights gained from these steps show the adequacy of selected Eclipse technologies for serving tasks in machine automation software.