Migration of industrial process control systems to service-oriented architectures

ABSTARCT

The use of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) in industrial automation promises an improved cross-layer integration as well as a functionality decoupled from the technical implementation. Compared with the earlier investigated manufacturing industry, control systems in the process industry reveal additional challenges in terms of migration from a legacy control system to an SOA control system.

The successful migration of a highly integrated process control system, without reducing reliability or availability and, at the same time, preserving functionality and productivity, requires a detailed plan and certain specialised technology.

This paper presents the challenges in the migration of a process control system and proposes a structured method for migration. The migration procedure proposed comprises four steps: initiation, configuration, data processing, and control execution. A technology demonstration at a pelletizing plant illustrates how the first of these steps could be implemented.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• SOA
• industrial process
• process control system

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful for support from the European Commission and thank the partners of the EU FP7 project IMC-AESOP (www.imc-aesop.eu) for fruitful discussions. Additional support was provided by the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking and the partners of the Arrowhead project (www.arrowhead.eu).

The authors also thank the LKAB company for open and collaborative work on this solution and for providing access to their Kiruna facilities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission [Grant Number 258682];ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking [Grant Number 332987].