Industrial Automation Services as part of the Cloud: First Experiences

Cloud computing has rapidly emerged as an accepted computing paradigm in many areas such as office and enterprise systems worldwide. But still industrial automation domain has slow movement toward this technology due to the automation’s certain requirements which are differed in many aspects from common IT systems. Thus far, existing works related to cloud computing for automation frequently cover higher levels of automation pyramid e.g. enterprise management and process control levels. The main goal of this paper is to draw an image about current state of the research in this field and then introducing first use cases to deliver automation functions as services to the lower levels from the cloud.