Automating integration of manufacturing systems and services: a semantic Web services approach

In this paper, we present a semantic Web services approach to automated integration of manufacturing systems and services. A service-oriented integration architecture, enhanced with semantics, is presented. We construct a service-oriented environment via virtualization by taking a WS-resource framework approach. All Web services (newly developed manufacturing services or those from the virtualization) are semantically enhanced using service upper ontology OWL-S and manufacturing domain ontologies which are written in standard Web ontology language (OWL). Within this semantic rich environment, integration is achieved by Web services composition, and automation is accomplished via the combination of semantic Web and software agents.