Intelligent Visualisation of Process State Using Service Oriented Architechture

Modern maintenance personel are becoming experts that are rare in number on global scale. The common factors with these experts are 1) they are on the move; 2) they are utilised in global scale; 3) they have multiple information access devices with different capabilities and 4) they rely on information on demand with extensive meta information requirements. The automation services support system is in the future integral part of core automation system and works as extension of the experts. It provides preprosessed information and solution suggestions for the mobile expert. Process state information provided to the maintenance personnel must be in compact form. As information in automation services support systems comes more and more globally distributed becomes Service Oriented Architechture viable solution for information access. Mobile experts require compact and fast decision supporting displays and user interface in order to handle the increasing work load. This requires intelligent, intuitive and robust preprosessing system as a backbone for automation lifecycle management. This paper presents how service oriented architecture can be utilised in automation services support system. The introduced framework combines rapid analysis development and intelligent process state visualisation for mobile expert and discusses the challenges met in building reliable mobile services for global automation. Copyright c 2005 IFAC