Service-Oriented Architecture in Industrial Automation Systems - The case of IEC 61499: A Review

formal model is proposed for the application of SOA in the distributed automation domain in order to achieve flexible automation systems. A SOA-based execution environment architecture based on the IEC 61499 Function Block model is proposed and a case study is used to demonstrate dynamic reconfiguration. In this letter, a review of the literature related to the use of SOA in Industrial Automation Systems is given to set up a context for the discussion of the proposed in the above paper SOA IEC 61499 formal model. The presented, in the above paper, formal model and the execution environment architecture are discussed towards a better understanding of the potentials for the exploitation of the SOA paradigm in the industrial automation domain. I. INTRODUCTION Authors in the first issue of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, ten years ago, described opportunities and challenges in using the service oriented architecture in manufacturing [1]. Since then several research articles published in the same journal reporting successful or promising results regarding the exploitation of the SOA paradigm in the industrial automation system (IAS) domain, e.g., [2][3][4]. Similar results have been published in other journals too, e.g. [5]. In the last issue of the journal, i.e., June 2015, authors present in [7], a formal model for the application of SOA in the distributed automation domain in order to achieve flexibility. They adopt the IEC 61499 standard [25] instead of the widely used in industry IEC 61131 [26], for several reasons they present in the paper. They also describe an execution environment based on the proposed formal model and demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed approach by a scenario for dynamic reconfiguration. In this letter the proposed approach is discussed in the context of both the SOA paradigm and the IEC 61499 Function Block model, in an attempt to identify advantages and disadvantages, and its potential for exploitation. The remainder of this letter is organized as follows. Section II discusses published work regarding the exploitation of SOA