Ontology-based web service integration for flexible manufacturing systems

This paper presents an approach to enabling ontology-based web service integration for flexible manufacturing systems based on industry 4.0 demonstration production line. The mass personalized customization requires increased agility and flexibility in manufacturing systems to adapt incessant changes in manufacturing environments and requirements. The fundamental for this method lies in the incorporation of knowledge expressed by ontologies concerning order, products, industrial equipment, manufacturing process, event and service. It is a significant method to use ontology for representing manufacturing knowledge in a computer-interpretable way. This knowledge model can be used by automated decision-making to configure the control component that monitors and harmonizes the whole manufacturing system. The semantic model of the flexible manufacturing systems can be automatically updated based on event notifications sent by the specialized web services. The architecture and knowledge model have been demonstrated in a pilot case named industry 4.0 demonstration production line and can be applied to other flexible manufacturing systems.