Using manufacturing service descriptions for flexible integration of production facilities to manufacturing clouds

Due to rapidly changing market needs and an increasing demand for customisable products, an upgrade in the flexibility of supply chain integration throughout production networks is an essential need for future manufacturing environments. Based on the ideas of cloud manufacturing and Manufacturing-as-a-Service, this paper shows an approach on how to interconnect factory-IT systems in flexible production networks by means of extraction and request of manufacturing services, requirements on manufacturing service descriptions which are to be used therefore, and a suggestion for an appropriate service description syntax which includes technical and product related contents as well as business and logistics information.