A Semantic Web Services-based approach for production systems control

Recent research projects have experimented with controlling production system equipment through web service interfaces. However, orchestrating these web services to accomplish a complicated production task can be difficult because the states of the production equipment and the set of available web services may change. This paper proposes an approach in which the production equipment and their states are modelled with an ontology, and the semantic model is dynamically analyzed to determine which action should next be taken in the production process. Similarly, the available web services are described with semantic models, and the descriptions are retrieved dynamically to find the web services capable of performing the required actions. While Web Ontology Language, OWL, is used in describing equipment statuses, the OWL-S ontology, which is based on OWL, is used for describing web services. Once the semantic service descriptions have been analyzed to find the appropriate web services, the services are invoked using their syntactic WSDL descriptions.