Decentralized Production control through ANSI / ISA-95 ~ based ontology and agents
Manos Georgoudakis, Christos Alexakos, Athanasios P. Kalogeras, John Gialelis, Stavros Koubias · 2006
This paper presents a distributed system architecture that is based on the prominent industrial standard ANSI / ISA-95 and utilizes ontologies and web services in an attempt to address the challenge of interoperability in the industrial enterprise environment in an efficient way. Work presented in this paper is partly financed by the PABADIS'PROMISE project framework (FP6-IST-016649). This paper proposes an agent-based approach, which assisted by an appropriate ontology attempts to match the properties of information agents and the generic requirements of the industrial automation domain in order to address automation information handling problems. The novelty of the approach lies in the utilization of ontological descriptions of the resources and the processes invoked by intelligent agents, while it couples production - related processes with shop floor equipment via standard Device Description Language, avoiding ad-hoc implementations. The benefits of this approach are optimal interoperability among the agents and adaptability in dealing with considerable changes in the industrial environment. Although ontological description of resources is hardly a new concept, the problem associated with this approach is the ad hoc methodology of description usually followed which renders the ontology to a dictionary usable only within the boundaries of the enterprise, thus of limited interoperability. The proposed framework is based on emerging web technologies such as Web Services, Ontology Web Language (OWL) and JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) agent platform while it introduces the following features: - ANSI / ISA 95 (2) based ontology implementation is used in order to model knowledge within the industrial environment domain.