An Upper Ontology for Manufacturing Service Description

Abstract

In today’s volatile market, manufacturing companies are increasingly adopting agile manufacturing strategies. Virtual Enterprise (VE) is one of the key enablers of the agile philosophy. Timely deployment of VE requires efficient communication between the potential members of VE through a common language. This work introduces Manufacturing Service Description Language (MSDL) as an ontology for representation of manufacturing services. MSDL provides the primitive building blocks required for description of a wide spectrum of manufacturing services. Description Logic is used as the knowledge representation formalism of MSDL in order to make it amenable to automatic reasoning.