Web service-oriented manufacturing resource applications for networked product development

Networked manufacturing enterprises need a wider support from external manufacturing resources. This paper proposes a promising service to use web-based extended manufacturing resources for product development. The system architecture and enabling techniques are presented. Manufacturing resources on the web are achieved through focused crawling and semantic web technologies. These resources are further utilized through web-based resource repositories such as part libraries. The major modules of web-based manufacturing resource service are encapsulated with web services. A case study of mould product development is presented, which promotes the networked collaborative design and manufacturing processes. Some preliminary results indicate the feasibility and scalability of web-based manufacturing resource services for networked manufacturing.