Service orientation is emerging nowadays at multiple organizational levels in enterprise business, and it leverages technology in response to the growing need for greater business integration, flexibility and agility of manufacturing enterprises.

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) analysed throughout the book represents a technical architecture, a business modelling concept, a type of infrastructure, an integration source and a new way of viewing units of automation within the enterprise. The primary goal of SOA is to align the business world with the world...