Paper presented at the 12th IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA 2007), held in Patras, Greece, from 25 to 28 September 2007.

This paper was attributed the Best Paper Award of the ETFA 2007 conference.

Abstract: Today manufacturers require efficient reaction to critical events occurring at the shop floor. Therefore, device-level data needs to be integrated into business processes in a standardized and flexible way to avoid time-consuming media breaks. Current approaches are characterized by a late indication of changes in the production environment and a delayed implementation of changed production plans. As a solution, we propose a web service-based integration of enterprise systems with shop-floor activities, using SOA-ready networked embedded devices. We examine the requirements for the integration and derive an appropriate architecture that tries to close the integration gap. The timely provision of data, the impact of device-level information on business processes, as well as the direct bidirectional communication with device-level services promotes the vision of adaptive manufacturing and leads to reduced production costs.