Machine ballets don't need conductors: Towards scheduling-based service choreographies in a real-time SOA for industrial automation

Today's manufacturing industry is under pressure to increase the flexibility of its factory lines. One approach to achieve this goal is the shift from centralized control systems towards distributed, service-oriented architectures (SOA). To fully leverage the benefit of this new paradigm, the SOA should extend down to the device level and even include resource-constrained devices, such as smart sensors and actuators. In this paper, we present our approach for a lightweight distributed service choreography without a central point of control. It is based on network-aware precalculation of a static, non-preemptive schedule for each device and is thus suitable even for constrained devices. In contrast to previous work, our focus lies on the planning components required for achieving a service choreography. Since scheduling is a central part of our architecture, and we expect it to be executed many times during the planning process, we evaluate different heuristics for this task.