Advances in the areas of embedded systems, computing, and networking are leading to an infrastructure composed of millions of heterogeneous devices. These devices will not simply convey information but process it in transit, connect peer to peer, and form advanced collaborations. This "Internet of Things" infrastructure will be strongly integrated with the environment, and its integration with the enterprise systems will not only further blur the line between business IT systems and the real world, but will change the way we design, deploy, and use services. New opportunities can emerge for businesses, which can now closely collaborate with the real world. The work presented here proposes an architecture for an effective integration of the Internet of Things in enterprise services.
1 Today manufacturers require efficient reaction to critical events occurring at the shop floor. Therefore, devicelevel data needs to be integrated into business processes in a standardized and flexible way to avoid time-consuming media breaks. Current approaches are characterized by a late indication of changes in the production environment and a delayed implementation of changed production plans. As a solution, we propose a web service-based integration of enterprise systems with shop-floor activities, using SOA-ready networked embedded devices. We examine the requirements for the integration and derive an appropriate architecture that tries to close the integration gap. The timely provision of data, the impact of device-level information on business processes, as well as the direct bidirectional communication with device-level services promotes the vision of adaptive manufacturing and leads to reduced production costs.
It is expected that millions of embedded devices and machines empowered with Internet technologies will be able to communicate, collaborate and offer their functionality as a service. At the shop floor, this creates new opportunities for more dynamic environments where timely usage of the monitoring information is coupled with control and in full collaboration with enterprise systems. We focus on demonstrating our efforts towards such cross-layer composition for the future service-enabled factory.
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