Service-Oriented Model-Based Control Dynamic Software for Dynamic Systems

Control loops trend towards cyber-physical systems and come with corresponding challenges that complex IT systems from other domains share, such as increased effort to integrate components into a system. Modern service-oriented architectures can help address these challenges by decoupling component development from system integration. This paper presents a concept to model control loop elements as services that are flexibly integrated at runtime using a central entity called orchestrator. Our concept is suitable for a general control system, is capable of running on embedded and general-purpose computers, and can ensure deterministic computations. We apply our approach to an experimental setup of a three-tank system and implement multiple control loops using a set of services and an orchestrator. We show that using our architecture, the service composition is easy to change dynamically at runtime and thus realize a retrofit of the process control.