Publication
Smart Process Optimization and Adaptive Execution with Semantic Services in Cloud Manufacturing
Luca Mazzola; Philipp Waibel; Patrick Kapahnke; Matthias Klusch
In: Information, Vol. 9, No. 11, Pages 279-307, MDPI, 2018.
Abstract
A new requirement for the manufacturing companies in Industry 4.0 is to be flexible with respect to changes in demands, requiring them to react rapidly and efficiently on the production capacities. Together with the trend to use Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), this requirement induces a need for agile collaboration among supply chain partners, but also between different divisions or branches of the same company. In order to address this collaboration challenge, we propose a novel pragmatic approach for the process analysis, implementation and execution. This is achieved through sets of semantic annotations of business process models encoded into BPMN 2.0 extensions. Building blocks for such manufacturing processes are the individual available services, which are also semantically annotated according to the Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) principles and stored into a common marketplace. The optimization of such manufacturing processes combines pattern-based semantic composition of services with their non-functional aspects. This is achieved by means of Quality-of-Service (QoS)-based Constraint Optimization Problem (COP) solving, resulting in an automatic implementation of service-based manufacturing processes. The produced solution is mapped back to the BPMN 2.0 standard formalism by means of the introduced extension
elements, fully detailing the enactable optimal process service plan produced. This approach allows
enacting a process instance, using just-in-time service leasing, allocation of resources and dynamic
replanning in the case of failures. This proposition provides the best compromise between external
visibility, control and flexibility. In this way, it provides an optimal approach for business process
models’ implementation, with a full service-oriented taste, by implementing user-defined QoS
metrics, just-in-time execution and basic dynamic repairing capabilities. This paper presents the
described approach and the technical architecture and depicts one initial industrial application in the
manufacturing domain of aluminum forging for bicycle hull body forming, where the advantages
stemming from the main capabilities of this approach are sketched.