Why SOA in industrial/ manufacturing space?

This is a question I have heard a lot, I have also heard SOA been thrown about in  Industrial market limited real understanding of the potential value.

So this week to add to the discussion I have included an extraction from “When last did you revisit your MOM?” By Gerhard Greeff – Divisional Manager at Bytes Systems Integration

“You may think that the SOA concept applied to manufacturing is outrageous and that it will never work. After-all, you have talked to the Enterprise Architects and they just don’t get the complexities of the manufacturing environment. But before you skip this section, do yourself a favour and read what SOA actually does according to Gartner and MESA and then think how you can apply that to manufacturing and MOM specifically.

A number of companies (including manufacturing companies) have implemented Enterprise Service Bus’s (ESB’s) specifically to ease integration. These ESB architectures have not however made their way down into manufacturing itself, and with good reason. The enterprise layer (level 4) and the manufacturing layer (level 3) are not the same, don’t work the same and have completely different priorities, data types and business processes. Only a fraction of manufacturing process data make its way up to the enterprise level and then typically only in aggregated form. A lot of manufacturing process data however is shared within levels 1 to 3.

MESA for instance states, “For MOM, a separate manufacturing services bus (MSB) is required due to a high number of transactions, a high parametric data load and near real-time requirements for operations applications. The MSB may be scaled down to a plant or an area of a plant or across multiple production facilities depending on the transaction/data load and response requirements of the operations workflows being supported by the plant applications.””

These comments I agree with, and the more you look and investigate what the leading thought leaders in industrial companies they are trying to solve this massive challenge of inter-operability at level 1 to 3 and horizontally across these levels. But unlike level 4 there will not be domination of one system, or a few, there are just too many specialities. The challenge is also the criticality to life, and operations, that these different systems cannot evolve at the same pace. As explained above SOA provides a infra-structure that allows this alignment, but at an evolutionary approach.  But the critical item is that services need to abide by the service structure, so they align, so others implementing that contract/ service can consume or contribute to that inter-operability. The concept of a separate Service Bus for the industrial sector is correct, when you look at the determinism, and performance needed. But can a service bus perform as we come to trust in this market. I am pleased say Invensys has been working down this service bus for the industrial market and before the end of year will release a true service bus that performances as we expect or are use too. But this is only an initial step on this road, as we move into this “federation” vs replace mode and look at the real opportunity we have when we align the assets, people, systems and applications especially horizontally at level 2, and 3.

“SOA architecture allows for the creation of composite business applications from independent, self-describing and interchangeable code modules called “services.” These services are available for use on a services bus and can be arranged into a business process or a composite application using process choreography. When SOA is employed as an integration strategy, it brings about a catalogue of self-describing, atomic business services that are used together to create a business process (including manufacturing operations process).