Unified sensor data provisioning with semantic technologies

The growing demand for improved reactivity to market trends faces manufacturing systems with new changeability requirements under increasing complexity constraints. Sensors are the ears and eyes of systems controlling automated production processes. Additionally, they provide necessary information to monitoring and maintenance applications which are also forced to be adaptable to system evolution. Semantic technologies are key enabler to foster integration and interoperability of large-scale, heterogeneous data sources. In this paper, we discuss approaches to integrate semantic technology with the upcoming standard OPC-UA and present a solution to taps the full potential of both through semantic-based sensor discovery and automatic sensor data provisioning with OPC-UA.