A migration approach towards a SOA-based next generation process control and monitoring

Interest in Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) in the automation domain has seen a rapid increase both from the academia as well as the industry recent years. Since green field plants today are not common, the partial migration of plant automation to SOA design is needed to introduce new functionalities. Thus strategies and approaches for migration from legacy to SOA architectures becomes of vital interest. This paper discusses different views on partial migration of a process monitoring and control system from legacy to SOA. The discussion includes a global top down view, a bottom up view, hardware/software considerations and a hint on training of personnel.