Potentials of Web Standards for Automation Control in Manufacturing Systems

Web standards developed mainly by W3C and OASIS shape general IT domain and its applications. Due to the scale of web applications, the web standards have matured to deal with the typical situations of finding the right node on the network, reconfiguring the routing for messaging, using common standards for representing graphical information and many others. Industrial manufacturing can benefit from the web standards due to the interoperability and simplified application integration. This article reviews the current use of web standards in the industrial automation domain. In addition, the manuscript describes and discusses the potentials of using web standards at all the levels of automation system: from high level web-based user interfaces to the industrial controllers, which are located in the lowest layer of the well-known automation pyramid. Aligned with such description, the article presents a framework for Open, Knowledge Driven Manufacturing Execution Systems (OKD-MES), which allows using systematically web standards and technologies in factories.