Applying Ontologies in a Cloud Manufacturing System

Regarding small and medium enterprises, increased competitiveness and resource utilization could be reached by integrating their resources and combining their services thus establishing a collaborative and flexible infrastructure. Combining services can be addressed by employing the paradigm of cloud manufacturing, which is a service-oriented manufacturing model with characteristics of dynamical scalability and reconfigurability as well as distributive collaboration. This paper introduces a cloud manufacturing system architecture that involves the usage of ontologies for representing knowledge on various layers. On the cloud layer, an ontology is used for representing company services and orders. A manufacturing execution system ontology is employed on the intra-factory layer for the representation of machines, operations and material. Furthermore, a 3D printing ontology specifically describes concepts related to additive manufacturing. These ontologies are intended as data source for scheduling mechanisms.