An Ontology-Based Manufacturing Description for Flexible Production

In the field of industrial manufacturing, service-oriented approaches provide a technical support for flexible production. Some studies have realized the automatic discovery and dynamic orchestration of services by expressing services or devices using the ontology technology with the aim of improving the adaptability of the manufacturing system to changes. However, these studies are limited to describe physical entities as scattered entities in knowledge representation similar to web pages from an Internet perspective, rather than describing the manufacturing as a process in the view of the manufacturing. They do not take the value of the process relationship into consideration during the manufacturing process. This hinders a further understanding of the manufacturing process in a machine-readable manner, and limits the intelligent processing ability of the manufacturing system in response to changes, which play an important role in the adaptability and intelligence of flexible production. Therefore, to enhance the intelligence and adaptability of the flexible production, this paper presents an Ontology-based Manufacturing Description (OMD) for flexible production along with the description of physical entities such as production processes, equipments and products, and the relationships of operation logic and operation sequences in manufacturing process. With the support of ontology description, the manufacturing system can make automatic adjustments for ensuring the completion of the manufacturing process when there are changes in internal manufacturing requirements or external environments