Ivan M. Delamer

Orchestration of service-oriented manufacturing processes

This paper outlines the perspectives opened by the application of the service-orientation paradigm for realizing high-level communications between next-generation, increasingly intelligent embedded devices - it indicates how this approach can benefit the manufacturing industry - and outlines the issues and approaches for cohesively coordinating manufacturing services at various levels of the manufacturing device hierarchy

Service-oriented architectures for collaborative automation

This paper describes a vision for utilising service-oriented architectures (SOA) to support the lifecycle needs of automation systems in the context of agile manufacturing, i.e., engineering easily configurable manufacturing systems composed of standard components that may be remotely supported by geographically distributed engineering partners to suit changing and unpredictable business needs. The paper briefly reviews the relevant state of the art in collaborative automation systems and considers the potential of SOA to support the practical implementation of such systems, with traditional product-oriented methods replaced by more service-oriented ways of working. As the SOA paradigm holds the promise of being applicable across the entire spectrum of manufacturing systems and devices, down to sensors and actuators, the paper further addresses issues involved in discovery and orchestration of device-level services and discusses the potential benefits of using semantic Web techniques for automating service selection, invocation and composition, so as to facilitate rapid reconfiguration. This discussion is supported by a practical example of device-level SOA.

Service-Oriented Architecture for Distributed Publish/Subscribe Middleware in Electronics Production

The Computer Aided Manufacturing using XML (CAMX) framework enables integrating electronics production systems using message-oriented middleware, offering standards-based communication among machines and control software applications. CAMX frameworks implement publish/subscribe of XML messages through an entity called the message broker (MSB), which provides the messaging service using a web-based interface. A challenge for MSB-based systems is that they must scale to handle large volumes of messaging traffic, which is a characteristic of modern information-intensive manufacturing systems. This paper first tackles this challenge by presenting an array of architecture patterns for creating distributed MSB frameworks, focusing mainly on globally distributed federations and locally distributed clusters. A unified architecture is subsequently presented that leverages the different patterns by combining federated frameworks with locally distributed clusters into a unified set of architecture elements and interactions. A service-oriented approach is followed to provide a uniform interface for distributed MSB elements, whether federated or locally distributed. The service-oriented approach is also used to dynamically discover resources and automatically invoke the (re)configuration and messaging services. The services are enriched with semantics in order to facilitate automatic discovery and selection of services using the semantic web services formal ontology. Semantic service advertisements are propagated using a peer-to-peer discovery protocol. The approach presented in this paper is not limited to the CAMX case and is generally applicable to distributed event-based manufacturing systems

Loosely-coupled Automation Systems using Device-level SOA

This paper discusses software abstractions that facilitate the development of loosely-coupled automation systems, i.e. systems where elements can be easily added, removed, or replaced without needing widespread changes across the system. Event-oriented and service-oriented abstractions are explored as candidate approaches to provide loosely-coupled interactions and dynamic discovery. Ontologies and semantic Web services are proposed in order to facilitate the discovery and selection of automation elements without need for pre-programming. A demonstrator from the domain of automated assembly is used to illustrate the principles and show the feasibility of the approach.

Ontology Modeling of Assembly Processes and Systems using Semantic Web Services

The reported work is motivated by the need to rapidly (re)configure manufacturing systems in order to cope with high product mix and frequent new product introduction. One of the current obstacles for achieving systems that are rapidly reconfigurable is the need for manual reprogramming of software elements. Service-oriented architecture has been proposed as a potential technology facilitator to improve the reconfigurability of distributed manufacturing systems. However, a technology gap is identified in the development of service orchestration and choreography models and in the matchmaking of services, which still require manual (re)programming. This paper proposes the use of semantic Web services to overcome this shortcoming, and describes the required components of an ontology used to create semantically-enriched service descriptions. The reported ontology is tailored for the manufacturing domain of assembly.

Ontologies for Production Automation

The manufacturing sector is currently under pressures to swiftly accommodate new products by quickly setting up new factories or retrofitting existing ones. In order to achieve this goal, engineering tasks currently performed manually need to be automated. In this scenario, ontologies emerge as a candidate solution for representing knowledge about manufacturing processes, equipment, and products in a machine-interpretable way. This knowledge can then be used by automated problem-solving methods to (re)configure the control software that coordinates and supervises manufacturing systems. This chapter reviews current approaches to use ontologies in the manufacturing domain, which include use for vocabulary definition in multi-agent systems and use for describing processes using Semantic Web Services. In addition, current and emerging research trends are identified.

Self-orchestration and choreography: towards architecture-agnostic manufacturing systems

One of the significant challenges for current and future manufacturing systems is that of providing rapid reconfigurability in order to evolve and adapt to mass customization. This challenge is aggravated if new types of processes and components are introduced, as existing components are expected to interact with the novel entities but have no previous knowledge on how to collaborate. This paper reviews the concepts of orchestration and choreography applied to device-level Web services, and proposes the use of semantic Web Services in order to overcome the aforementioned challenge. The capabilities of semantic Web services for performing automatic service discovery, selection, composition and invocation enable manufacturing systems to self-orchestrate without need for manual configuration, and without need for concentrating logic in centralized systems.

Quality of service for CAMX middleware

Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) using extensible markup language (XML) (CAMX) standards are enabling the vision of the plug & play factory for the electronics production industry. One of the implementation challenges of CAMX-message-oriented middleware for device and system communication is that of providing quality of service at the message layer. This paper analyses processes and traffic models in CAMX production environments and proposes an abstract model for quality of service. An effective implementation of this infrastructure is analysed through simulation in order to validate the proposed approach to quality of service. An approach to map quality of service at the CAMX layer to the network and data-link layers is also presented.

Embedded service oriented monitoring, diagnostics and control: Towards the asset-aware and self-recovery factory

In Europe, the manufacturing sector represents nearly the 22% of the GDP. Since the beginning of the European Technology Platform MANUFUTURE, Service Oriented Architecture have become the de facto in the industrial informatics research community. In most cases, SOA is implemented by using Web Service technology based on RESTful services or WS-∗ standards. Several publications have shown the advantages of WS technologies in Factory Automation e.g. enterprise integration, monitoring and control, real-time decision taking, maintenance scheduling, and reconfiguration. Monitoring has become an effortless task, leading to massive data to be processed in order to present a diagnostic i.e. asset-awareness. Further, once problems are identified, an automatic self-recovery mechanism should be provided in order to minimize loses. This paper introduce the eSONIA project which aims to improve the flow of information, rather than raw data, in the factory floor by enhancing the system awareness and granting self-recovery to the factory. To achieve this goal, eSONIA uses pervasive heterogeneous embedded devices intercommunicated with WS technologies over IPv6.

Evolutionary multi-objective optimization of QoS-Aware Publish/Subscribe Middleware in electronics production

Abstract Computer-Aided Manufacturing using XML (CAMX) production systems are built on Message-Oriented Middleware Frameworks, offering standards-based communication among machines and control software applications. CAMX Frameworks implement Publish/Subscribe of XML messages through an entity called the Message Broker (MSB), which provides the messaging service using a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface. In order to create scalable frameworks, distributed MSB systems are deployed. However, the topology optimization problem arises, as clients need to be assigned to one of many MSB nodes. The problem is strictly NP-hard, and multiple optimization criteria are conflicting. A solution considering real-time systems was developed based on Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization techniques. The Framework Optimization Algorithm (FOA) is designed to work with various topologies, including federated frameworks, locally distributed clusters, and mixed environments including embedded middleware nodes. The developed FOA was tested for a case scenario based on a flexible manufacturing system running on a distributed CAMX framework, and proved to robustly converge to the optimal topology. Convergence was achieved within few seconds, demonstrating the suitability of FOA for rapid topology reconfiguration in response to changes in the system.