Manufacturing systems are getting more and more distributed, mainly because of the growing interconnection through networks of machines, manufacturing lines, cells, plants or enterprises. Agent technology has proven to be a solution to manage distributed systems, reinforcing the importance of information and communication, and focusing attention on the interoperability between the different parts. In this paper, the interoperability of a distributed manufacturing system is addressed, in an application employing software agents faced to heterogeneous resources. The approach consists to unify all the data exchanged by the agents in a common framework, and follows first the design of all the information in a meta model, then the construction of an ontology, and finally the specification of a common description language.
['Daniel Diep', 'Christos E. Alexakos', 'Thomas Wagner']
An ontology-based interoperability framework for distributed manufacturing control