ABSTRACT
Integrated automation systems are gaining more and more momentum in the automation industry. They address not only the vertical integration that covers layers from devices via manufacturing execution systems to business applications but also the horizontal integration ranging from design, engineering, and operation to maintenance and support. The emerging Web Services technology with growing acceptance in industry is a good way to create an open, flexible, and platform-neutral integrated system. In this chapter, we attempt to analyze and describe the main challenges in using Web Services for integrated automation systems. We believe that performance, client compatibility, client addressability, object designation, and ability to deal with multiple structures are important and essential issues for deploying Web Services in automation systems. We present some solution concepts including architecture, mechanisms and methods such as the structure cursor, Web Services bundling, the event service, the object designator, and so forth. Finally, we discuss the future of using Web Services, where Ontology will play an important role for efficient system engineering and assembling.
