Service-oriented Architecture

Today, manufacturing facilities are designed for mass-producing identical goods. Although they often have a certain flexibility, they are not fully changeable. Changes are associated with a high cost. Changeability allows producers to react more quickly to changing demand situations and to efficiently produce small quantities. The Digital Twin is a key concept for implementing the required changeability. In the reference project BaSys 4.0, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), we have developed a manufacturing concept that enables changeable production. Our open source middleware Eclipse BaSyx provides a reference implementation of the BaSys 4.0 concepts.

Process Portals are the fundament for he realisation of service oriented architectures (SOA). They are the central interface for all applications and their use by humans (human-machine integration). The role based personalization along user processes is the major added value of process portals which includes the integration of the necessary backend applications (machine-machine integration). SOA is based on the same concept, a process and service oriented view of the enterprise and the componentisation and flexibilisation of the IS/IT architecture. Compared with traditional architecture approaches, such as e.g. the client/server architecture, SOA expands this model with the process portal (human-machine integration) and the integration infrastructure (machine-machine integration) as two additional components. This article describes the construction principles of SOA with process portals as a starting point and presents a method for the realization of this architecture approach in the ...

Nowadays it is not unusual that the R & D departments of global players might be spread over several locations worldwide. Whenever fast decisions are to be made in many times such an organization can lead to delays. Web based corporate portals with synchronous and asynchronous features of communication have been approved as a practical solution. Within a service oriented architecture it not only illustrates comprehensibly overlapping business processes, it also offers staff members so-called „Collaboration Services“ which substantially simplify teamwork.

When transporting or storing chemicals or other hazardous materials, certain storage regulations need to be observed to avoid incidents that could cause damage to humans or the environment. In principle, wireless sensor networks can be used to implement a fully automatic monitoring of all storage regulations. However, for the introduction of the technology into real-world applications, some practical problems have to be solved first. Making local decisions within an intelligent network offers many operational benefits, but it also complicates the management and the supervision of the whole system. A service-oriented approach is one possible solution: Business logic is defined in the form of services that can be deployed to individual sensor nodes based on the specific application requirements.

The management of inter-organisational business processes is a crucial and necessary factor towards the economic success of an enterprise. Flexibility and manageability of processes are core requirements to interoperability. In the article, we discuss the two complementary paradigms of the service-oriented approach and of the process-oriented approach. We demonstrate how the combination of these two concepts can be used to realize flexible and manageable processes even in a cross-enterprise scenario. The main advantage of this approach is the ability to compose business processes in a flexible way without losing the instruments of an effective business process management.