—The current trends in service consolidation over Internet Protocol (IP) also stimulates the integration of the industrial automation system with the information technology (IT) infrastructure for more efficient information access and more cost-effective production and management. Field buses have been the de facto communication standard in industrial automation, but mostly based on manufacture-specific protocols. Thus, the interoperability between the manufacturer-specific field bus systems and the external operating environment is the critical factor in enabling the networked industrial automation systems. However, most of the existing field bus integration solutions lack either flexibility or scalability. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based field bus integration architecture (SOAFBIA), where each field bus system is encapsulated with optional interface, manageability interface, and semantic descriptions in a stand format to facilitate inte...