Representation of manufacturing equipment and services for OKD-MES: From service descriptions to ontology

Demand for efficiency in the domain of manufacturing increases driven by competition for resources and customers. Adaptation of the modern concepts which have proven their benefits in other domains to the automation of manufacturing systems provides a field for innovation. Recent developments in Cyber-Physical Systems, Service-oriented Architecture and Knowledge-Driven Approach suggest an ecosystem for contemporary factory. Such set of concepts is applied in the eScop project for implementation of Open Knowledge-Driven Manufacturing Execution System (OKD-MES). The Knowledge-Driven approach introduces new possibilities for efficient operation of the system, but also requires significant effort to describe knowledge about the system. Significant part of this knowledge may be provided by the equipment in the factory shop floor. The approach which facilitates the process of population of knowledge base using the data from manufacturing equipment in automated manner should lower the cost and the organizational threshold for introduction of OKD-MES to the industry. This paper evaluates the possibilities for extraction of required semantic data from the descriptions provided by the smart service-oriented manufacturing equipment.