SOA Meets Robots - A Service-Based Software Infrastructure for Remote Laboratories

Abstract

With the ongoing internationalization of virtual
laboratories, the integration aspect becomes more
important. The meanwhile commonly accepted ’glue’ for
such legacy systems are service oriented architectures, based
on standardized and accepted Web service standards.
We present our concept of the ’experiment as a service’,
where the idea of service-based architectures is applied to
virtual remote laboratories. In our laboratory middleware,
experiments are represented as stateful service
implementations and jobs as logical service instances of
these implementations. We discuss performance, reliability,
security and monitoring issues in this approach, and show
how the resulting infrastructure - the Distributed Control
Lab - is applied in the European VetTrend project.