Planning-Based Semantic Web Service Composition In Factory Automation

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm enables production systems to be composed of web services. In an SOA-based production system, the individual production devices provide web service interfaces that encapsulate the behavior of the devices and abstract the implementation details. Such a service-oriented approach makes it possible to apply web service orchestration technologies in the development of production workflow descriptions. While manual formulation of production workflows tends to require considerable effort from domain-experts, semantic web service descriptions enable computer algorithms to automatically generate the appropriate web service orchestrations. Such algorithms realize AI planning and employ semantic web service descriptions in determining the workflows required to achieve the production goals desired. In addition, the algorithms can automatically adapt the workflows to unexpected changes in the goals pursued and the production devices available. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.