Service Discovery in Industrial Agent Systems

In assembly production lines machines/devices are usually controlled by huge monolithic code, difficult to modify and costly in terms of time. On the other hand, tumultuous market conditions and short life cycle of products demand from companies to have rapidly adjustable production lines. Therefore, a system to be effectively reconfigurable may need well defined modules of hardware and software designed to work in a distributed control system. New paradigms such as semantic web services could support the discovering of newcomers i.e. mechatronic devices/machines capable of perform certain assembly operations. This work analyses the requirements to describe and discover semantic web services in the domain of assembly systems. Additionally, is included a test case in which semantic web services are discovered setting up agent-based reconfigurable manufacturing systems.