Dynamic Modeling of Manufacturing Equipment Capability in Cloud Manufacturing

In order to efficiently obtain the on-demand services of manufacturing equipment resources in terms of the customers’ requirements, the manufacturing equipment resources together with their capability should be searched and matched during the production processes in Cloud Manufacturing. In this context, the issue of how to realize the dynamic formal description of manufacturing equipment capability becomes a basis to support such manufacturing activities. In this paper, the manufacturing equipment capability was modeled dynamically using OWL (Web Ontology Language), based on the mapping relation which associates manufacturing equipment capability attributes and real-time data. The semantic relationship between concepts in the ontology model can be explicitly and implicitly reflected using the OWL which makes it convenient to discover, share and reuse the manufacturing equipment capability. The effectiveness of the proposed modeling method was validated by a case study, and the results showed that the dynamic modeling method could reflect current state and dynamic capability of manufacturing equipment resources.