Enabling a ubiquitous and cloud manufacturing foundation with field-level service-oriented architecture

A shift in manufacturing paradigms from centralised to decentralised IT architectures has seen the advancement of cyber physical manufacturing systems towards more interoperable ecosystems with service-oriented architecture (SOA) through ubiquitous and cloud technology. Sociologically decentralised interoperability between systems enables collaboration for local goal satisfaction and global system operation, where synergies can be created by parallel computation and interaction. Economically, SOA technology promotes dynamic reconfigurability, providing manufacturers quick responsiveness to market changes and disturbances, and ultimately enabling enterprises to stay competitive in the marketplace. This reconfigurable nature in decentralised systems is paramount, as entities are no longer bound by strict proprietary peer-to-peer interactive relationships, as data is freely replicable and dispersible throughout a network. Subsequently, from reconfigurability comes the flexibility to provide for environment change, promote system extensibility and allow for the incorporation of legacy technology and the integration of future technology. The focus of this research is to capture the state-of-the-art in field-level SOA approaches in the context of enabling a foundation for ubiquitous and cloud enterprise for manufacturing. The reviewed systems include; the industrial standard OLE for process control–unified architecture (OPC-UA), the emergent universal factory floor communication protocol MTConnect, the National Instrument Shared Variable Engine (SVE) and the data interoperability specification DPWS. The aim of this work is to provide an introduction to SOA systems, modelling techniques and enterprise integration; to provide a comparative topological review of the different field-level manufacturing SOAs; and outline state-of-the-art developments in manufacturing SOA research, contextualised under ubiquitous and cloud enterprise for manufacturing.