Boonserm Kulvatunyou

Discovering and integrating distributed manufacturing services with semantic manufacturing capability profiles

Integrating distributed manufacturing systems is a longstanding dream of industrial engineers. The advent of internet technologies has provided opportunities to fulfill this dream, and has presented new challenges to overcome. Since most current internet technologies (e.g. SOA, web service) originated in business applications, it is difficult to apply them directly to manufacturing systems. The difficulties stem particularly from differences in meaning and usage of manufacturing terms and an inability to express semantic information about manufacturing services. The present paper aims to extend the universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) registry specification to include semantic descriptions about manufacturing services and to support reasoning of those descriptions for service discovery. Specifically, we provide OWL-based definitions for manufacturing service capability profiles and a description logic (DL)-based reasoning procedure for matching queries to service descriptions. An illustrative process is presented with a prototype implementation for a discrete part manufacturing case.

Integration Framework of Process Planning based on Resource Independent Operation Summary to Support Collaborative Manufacturing

In todays global manufacturing environment, manufacturing functions are distributed as never before. Design, engineering, fabrication, and assembly of new products are done routinely in many different enterprises scattered around the world. Successful business transactions require the sharing of design and engineering data on an unprecedented scale. This paper describes a framework that facilitates the collaboration of engineering tasks, particularly process planning and analysis, to support such globalized manufacturing activities. The information models of data and the software components that integrate those information models are described. The integration framework uses an Integrated Product and Process Data (IPPD) representation called a Resource Independent Operation Summary (RIOS) to facilitate the communication of business and manufacturing requirements. Hierarchical process modelling, process planning decomposition and an augmented AND/OR directed graph are used in this representation. The Resource Specific Process Planning (RSPP) module assigns the required equipment and tools, selects process parameters, and determines manufacturing costs based on two-level hierarchical RIOS data. The shop floor knowledge (resource and process knowledge) and a hybrid approach (heuristic and linear programming) to linearize the AND/OR graph provide the basis for the planning. Finally, a prototype system is developed and demonstrated with an exemplary part. Java and XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) are used to ensure software and information portability.

Semantic mediation for standard-based B2B interoperability

A semantic-mediation architecture advances traditional approaches for standard-based business-to-business interoperability. The architecture formally models a business domain in a reference ontology and annotates domain message schemas to define public and proprietary reconciliation rule sets. Enterprises can use the rule sets to implement standard-based message interfaces and to translate message content between their proprietary message forms. An implementation of the semantic-mediation architecture augments a general applications-integration toolset developed for the Athena European FP 6 project. The implementation demonstrates the architectures feasibility and suggests directions for future tool enhancements.

Determination of efficient simulation model fidelity for flexible manufacturing systems

This paper presents a framework for the determination of an efficient level of simulation model fidelity for flexible manufacturing systems, which will achieve acceptable output accuracy with minimum resources and thereby reduce model building effort and computation time. To this end, we first formally define different levels of model fidelity using building blocks available in object-oriented (O-O) modelling, where an operation at a higher level is either decomposed into more detailed operations or subjected to more constraints at a lower level. In this paper, five models with different fidelities are defined. Then, simulation models that conform to these O-O models are constructed. Using these simulation models, intensive experiments are conducted to examine how the factors that characterize an FMS contribute to the relative errors of outputs from different models. Since no actual systems are considered, the results generated from the most detailed simulation model are used as references. The experimental results are then summarized by regression-based meta-models. In the proposed framework, the most efficient model for a new FMS is identified so that the relative error of a model estimated from the meta-model is closest to the threshold value provided by users. This framework is tested by two sample FMSs, and the initial results look quite promising.

A reference activity model for smart factory design and improvement

Abstract Smart manufacturing systems (SMSs) are envisioned to contain highly automated and IT-driven production systems. To address the complexity that arises in such systems, a standard and holistic model for describing its activities and their interrelationships is needed. This paper introduces a factory design and improvement (FDI) activity model and illustrates a case study of FDI in an electromechanical component factory. In essence, FDI is a reference activity model that encompasses a range of manufacturing system activities for designing and improving a factory during its initial development and also its operational phases. The FDI model shows not only the dependency between activities and manufacturing control levels but also the pieces of information and software functions each activity relies on. We envision that the availability of these pieces of information in digital form to integrate across the software functions will increase the agility of factory design and improvement projects. Therefore, our future work lies in contributing to standards for exchanging such information.

A semantic-mediation architecture for interoperable supply-chain applications

This paper presents a semantic-mediation architecture that enables standards-based interoperability between heterogeneous supply-chain applications. The architecture was implemented using a state-of-the-art semantic-mediation toolset for design-time and run-time integration tasks. The design-time tools supported a domain ontology definition, message annotations, message schema transformations and reconciliation rules specifications. The run-time tools performed exchanges, transformations, and reconciliations of the messages. The architecture supports a supply-chain integration scenario where heterogeneous automotive manufacturing supply-chain applications exchange inventory information.

Investigation of influence of modeling fidelities on supply chain dynamics

In this paper, a three-echelon supply chain model is analyzed to determine strategies to reduce the supply chain system dynamics. Uniqueness of this research stems from the use of multiple models with varying degrees of detail representing the same supply chain. The significance of a detailed supply chain model on the quality of result is made clear. Factors employed to build an abstract to a detailed model include: transportation and production delay, demand at the retailer, and production and transportation capacity. It is shown that the system dynamics itself varies with increasing detail in the model. In addition, it is examined to see if a strategy found effective in improving the system dynamics with an abstract model is effective with a detailed model. It is established that the strategy found to be the most effective on an abstract model is not always the best strategy for the real supply chain.

Integrating real-time analytics and continuous performance management in smart manufacturing systems

This paper proposes an approach to integrate real-time analytics with continuous performance management. The proposed system exploits the increasing availability of industrial process and production performance data. This paper identifies components of such a system and the interface between components within the system. The components presented in this paper form the basis for further research on understanding potential interoperability issues and required standardization efforts to support development of a system.

Concept Analysis to Enrich Manufacturing Service Capability Models

Abstract When an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), which makes a final product for the consumer marketplace by purchasing components from its suppliers, faces unexpected supply network failures and market events, models of suppliers‟ manufacturing service capabilities can provide information required for efficient recovery of these supply network. Models of manufacturing service capabilities include descriptions of both material processing and manufacturing information processing capabilities of a supplier. Presently, manufacturers and suppliers are challenged in making and streamlining sourcing decisions due to limited, imprecise, or ambiguous semantics associated with these models. This paper identifies issues with existing manufacturing service capability (MSC) models by analyzing several practical use cases found in existing web portals containing supplier capability descriptions. We identify the use of an ontology-based manufacturing service capability model can address the imprecision and ambiguity issues. This paper also proposes an approach based on concept analyses on archetypal data sets as a way to enrich semantics and address the limited semantic issues. Several model extension methods for semantic enrichments are formalized within the approach. We demonstrate the approach on an ontology-based manufacturing service model called manufacturing service description language (MSDL) using data sets including product and service categories, detailed capability descriptions of specific processes, and product-term definitions.

Content-Level conformance testing: an information mapping case study

Content-level conformance testing is a key to achieving interoperable data exchange among applications deployed across collaborating, yet independent enterprises. In this paper, we identify four types of content-level conformance tests to support interoperable data exchange: document-verification tests, information-mapping tests, transaction-behavior tests, and scenario-based tests. We describe in substantial detail our experience with information-mapping tests within an industrial B2B integration effort. We review different approaches to information-mapping conformance verification including logical consistency checking, human-computer interaction, and event-based checking. We adopt the human-computer interaction approach and describe a test-case generation methodology. The methodology details modeling, test requirements specification, abstract test-case definition, and, ultimately, executable test-case generation. Lastly, we provide experimental results of applying our methodology in the context of an automotive industry development of data exchange standard for interoperable inventory visibility applications.