In the paper by W. Dai et al. (IEEE Trans. On Industrial Informatics, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 771-781, June 2015), a formal model is described for the application of SOA in the distributed automation domain in order to achieve flexible automation systems. A service-based execution environment architecture based on the IEC 61499 Function Block model is proposed and a case study is used to demonstrate dynamic reconfiguration. In this letter, a review of the literature related to the use of SOA in Industrial Automation Systems is given to set up a context for the discussion of the proposed in the above paper SOA IEC61499 formal model. The presented, in the above paper, formal model and execution environment architecture are commented towards a better understanding of the potentials for the exploitation of the SOA paradigm in the industrial automation domain.