Manufacturing Collaborative Process Integration Utilizing State of the Art Technologies

Rapid changes in market demand, dictate the need for enterprises, involved into collaborative manufacturing networks, to be sufficiently aware and agile in order to allow rapid adjustments in production. Different applications and systems that participate in the collaborative processes must interoperate. Contemporary collaborative processes cover the overall range of the industrial infrastructure from the industrial field up to the enterprise level and all the way through the supply chain. This paper presents a distributed system architecture that utilizes state-of-the-art technologies, such as workflows, ontologies and web services in order to address the above quest in an efficient way. I. INTRODUCTION Manufacturing enterprises of the 21st century operate in an environment where markets frequently change, new technologies continuously emerge and competition is fierce in a global scale. Manufacturing strategies should therefore adjust to support the delivery of qualitatively superior products, rapid market responsiveness and at the same time keep the production costs as low as possible. To cope with such competitive issues manufacturing enterprises choose, among other strategies, the externalization of production activities thus creating manufacturing networks or virtual chain corporations. Such networks are based on ideas, practices, and processes aiming at greatly enhancing the effectiveness of the extended enterprise, known as collaborative manufacturing. Key enablers of such networks are considered to be the advances in Information Technology and more specifically TCP/IP and HTTP ubiquity, and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) (1) domination. In order to address satisfactorily the above issues, collaborative manufacturing networks need to address the following fundamental requirements: enterprise systems / applications integration, heterogeneous industrial information environments interoperability, manufacturing agility and scalability. A great number of systems and applications exist in an enterprise industrial environment covering the whole range of the enterprise system hierarchical model. This model comprises three different layers: the field / shop floor layer, the plant layer and the enterprise layer. The field and the shop floor layers comprise equipment, such as sensors, actuators, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and numerical controllers (NCs). Applications at these layers are relevant to the distributed control code that is needed for the industrial production processes. The ubiquity of the Internet has led to the emergence of standards that allow the creation of a unifying infrastructure that makes possible the integration of the different systems at whatever layer they reside in. There is nevertheless a dividing line between applications at the lower and the higher levels. Our work presented in this paper is associated with a wider view that mandates the integration and interoperability of all the systems / applications that participate in the enterprise industrial environment from the shop floor to the boardroom. This integration is accomplished by describing an enterprise process by means of a workflow, and utilizing the state-of-the-art technology of Web-Services in order to open up industrial systems and make their functionalities available. Our approach introduces a further degree of interoperability at the system engineering level by incorporating semantic information described in ontologies related with the enterprise processes.