Orchestration vs. Choreography Functional Association for Future Automation Systems

Production flexibility, engineering efficiency and faster time-to-market are customer needs in order to survive on the market. Highly flexible system architectures are the key to fulfill these needs. Today’s procedural flexibility, like in the IEC 61512 standard, is not sufficient. Extending flexibility is a must, whereas central orchestration systems reach their limits. Besides orchestration there is a second association method, the choreography. The focus of this contribution is the question of how choreography can be applied in the automation context. Starting point of this contribution is a terminology foundation in the domain of micro-service automation systems followed by a characterization of orchestration and choreography in the automation context. In this paper, we show that both methods complement each other ideally. Central orchestration is used to coordinate decentralized choreographies - complexity reduction combined with high flexibility.