Discovering and integrating distributed manufacturing services with semantic manufacturing capability profiles

Abstract

Integrating distributed manufacturing systems is a longstanding dream of industrial engineers. The advent of internet technologies has provided opportunities to fulfill this dream, and has presented new challenges to overcome. Since most current internet technologies (e.g. SOA, web service) originated in business applications, it is difficult to apply them directly to manufacturing systems. The difficulties stem particularly from differences in meaning and usage of manufacturing terms and an inability to express semantic information about manufacturing services. The present paper aims to extend the universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) registry specification to include semantic descriptions about manufacturing services and to support reasoning of those descriptions for service discovery. Specifically, we provide OWL-based definitions for manufacturing service capability profiles and a description logic (DL)-based reasoning procedure for matching queries to service descriptions. An illustrative process is presented with a prototype implementation for a discrete part manufacturing case.