An ontology-based interoperability framework for distributed manufacturing control

Manufacturing systems are getting more and more distributed, mainly because of the growing interconnection through networks of machines, manufacturing lines, cells, plants or enterprises. Agent technology has proven to be a solution to manage distributed systems, reinforcing the importance of information and communication, and focusing attention on the interoperability between the different parts. In this paper, the interoperability of a distributed manufacturing system is addressed, in an application employing software agents faced to heterogeneous resources. The approach consists to unify all the data exchanged by the agents in a common framework, and follows first the design of all the information in a meta model, then the construction of an ontology, and finally the specification of a common description language.