Maintaining a Dynamic View of Semantic Web Services Representing Factory Automation Systems

Software agents controlling production devices must maintain an up-to-date view of the physical world state in order to efficiently reason and plan their actions. Especially in a factory automation system, the world state undergoes rapid evolution, and the world view must remain synchronized with the changes. This paper discusses two approaches to updating the world view based on event notifications sent by web services representing production devices in a manufacturing system. One of the approaches is based on separately specified update rules, and one automatically uses the semantic web service descriptions formulated in OWL-S. While this paper specifically focuses on the factory automation domain, the approaches presented are applicable to other domains as well.