This paper was presented at the Internet of Things 2008 Conference, established in Zürich (Switzerland) on 26-28 March 2008.

Abstract: On the one hand, enterprises manufacturing any kinds of goods require agile production technology to be able to fully accommodate their customers’ demand for flexibility. On the other hand, Smart Objects, such as networked intelligent machines or tagged raw materials, exhibit ever increasing capabilities, up to the point where they offer their smart behaviour as web services. The two trends towards higher flexibility and more capable objects will lead to a service-oriented infrastructure where complex processes will span over all types of systems — from the backend enterprise system down to the Smart Objects. To fully support this, we present SOCRADES, an integration architecture that can serve the requirements of future manufacturing. SOCRADES provides generic components upon which sophisticated production processes can be modelled. In this paper we in particular give a list of requirements, the design, and the reference implementation of that integration architecture.