Abstract

Engineering of complex automation systems is a major cost factor. One reason for the complexity of engineering processes is the tight coupling of automated functions and the actual automation device. The paper introduces a method and architecture to de-couple functions from devices. As foundation Peer-to-peer and Grid computing technologies are applied to provide a flexible framework for automated functions. A key issue is the applicability in actual industrial systems which is accounted for by designing an algorithm which can be implemented cost efficiently on resource constraint devices. The approach is evaluated through extensive simulations which demonstrate benefits and applicability of the proposed architecture.