Software Methodologies for the Engineering of Service-Oriented Industrial Automation: The Continuum Project

Service-orientation represents a new wave of features and solutions by bringing closer information technology to the industrial domain, particularly factory shop floors. The service-oriented automation software entities (designated here by bots) used in such approach requires a short set of methodologies and software targeting their specification for both computer systems and embedded automation devices. The present work explains the adopted methodologies and software developments for the engineering of service-based automation systems. The main contents focus on the specification of a framework for the development of bots and supporting engineering tools that are part of the Continuum project. The paper also does an overview over the engineering steps from the system design to the operation, and focuses the importance of the maintenance of automation bots. Such applications will contribute to decrease the development time and reduce the components' interdependency, offering enough flexibility for automatic reconfiguration of shop-floor layouts.