An event-based service-oriented infrastructure for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Abstract

Volatile markets require that associated manufacturing systems cope with a variety of products and frequent changes in capabilities. The required paradigm is that of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems, which are designed for gracefully assimilating changes in functionality. This paper proposes a middleware infrastructure that facilitates the process of integrating and (re)configuring manufacturing systems. The middleware follows a layered approach, in which an information infrastructure is implemented over an interaction infrastructure. The interaction infrastructure encapsulates the interaction primitives required to manage distribution in a loosely coupled way. A service-oriented approach is used for discovering deployed elements. A message-oriented approach is used to asynchronously propagate invocations and events. The information infrastructure encapsulates functionality to facilitate the invocation, using an upper ontology for Semantic Web Services in conjunction with domain ontologies in order to semantically model processes, products, equipment, the world and the relations between them. Three use cases extracted from a pilot assembly line are employed to illustrate the use of the infrastructure.