(4000) Mashing Up Manufacturing Thanks to Java SOAs.

Technical short talk 20 min

Thursday, 2008-06-26, 11:30 - 11:50, Arena 3

• Dominique Guinard - ETH Zurich / SAP Research (speaker)
• Vlad Trifa - ETH Zurich / SAP Research (co-speaker)
• Domnic Savio

Topics

• Middleware
• Web services
• Embedded systems

Abstract

SOAs are everywhere. The hype used to be in object oriented it is now in service 
oriented. Yet, turning legacy systems into SOAs is a (very) costly procedure. As 
such, it is only fair for companies to be demonstrated the real advantages of 
such architectures before prior taking a decision. In the European project 
SOCRADES (Service-Oriented Cross-layer infRAstructure for Distributed smart 
Embedded deviceS), sixteen major players of the world of manufacturing (such as 
SAP, Schneider Electrics, ABB Siemens, Jaguar, Boliden, APS, IFak, etc.) are 
working together to demonstrate the advantages of SOAs when globally applied to 
factories.

In today's world, the manufacturing industry is facing a number of challenges 
such as mass customization, last-minute changes and cross-organization 
processes. As a consequence, an increased flexibility in the manufacturing 
process is essential for customizing processes to individual needs, which in 
turn requires the ability to reconfigure production systems dynamically with 
very few or no human intervention. In addition, companies' improved integration, 
for example to enable shop-floor events (i.e. events in the manufacturing plant) 
to be directly and seamlessly integrated to top-floor enterprise applications 
such as Enterprise Resource Planning software (ERPs). We believe that migrating 
the current software used in factories to service oriented architectures goes 
towards fulfilling these needs for flexibility and vertical integration.

Thus, in SOCRADES we are developing a platform to design, execute and manage the 
next-generation of industrial automation systems that exploit the SOA paradigm 
both at the device and at the enterprise application level. During the talk, we 
will expose the platform, emphasizing the use of Java as a common language for 
implementing Webservices on the various layers composing the architecture. 
We will start with some insights of a Java SE and ME implementation of the DPWS 
standards (Device Profile Web Services) on various shop-floor devices. 
Afterwards, we will present a Java Enterprise application (SAP MII: SAP 
Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence, running on the SAP Netweaver Java EE 
Application Server) used for "mashing-up" the device-level services to 
create higher level services. Finally, we will discuss the integration of the 
provided services with Enterprise Applications (such as ERPs and PLMs).

To illustrate our architecture, we will expose two concrete prototypes. The 
first one demonstrates SOCRADES ability to enable the direct propagation of 
shop-floor events to ERPs, instantly informing customers of possible delays in 
case of a failure on the shop-floor. The second one depicts how SOCRADES can be 
used to create more flexible processes by demonstrating cross-companies 
interactions, thanks to common standards.