Abstract
The adoption of service-oriented architectures based on web services in industrial automation promises increased interoperability and flexibility. However, industrial automation requires real-time processing, i.e. a task has to be processed within a specific deadline, which is a large obstacle for utilizing web services in this domain.The Time-Constrained Services (TiCS) framework meets the demands of industrial automation and empowers automation engineers to develop, deploy, publish, compose, and invoke time-constrained web services. This paper presents the TiCS real-time SOAP engine for industrial PCs called SOAP4IPC. It permits the execution of web services in real-time. The architecture of the SOAP4IPC engine, implementation details, and experimental results are discussed.