A systematical approach to expose manufacturing system as a service

Nowadays, the manufacturing industry trends for reorganization in geographically dispersed systems with manufacturing activities realized by distributed and autonomous components. Advances in mechatronics, automation, communication, and information technologies support the feasibility of these novel structures. In this sense, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is a way to treat the distribution of manufacturing resources considering the heterogeneous nature of this environment. Aim to guarantee the autonomy and interoperability of manufacturing system service, a systematical procedure is presented to define properly these services. These manufacturing services consider operations such as teleoperation and remote monitoring of manufacturing activities, users online request, and shared resources management. Based on the nature of this type of system it is considered discrete event system (DES), and techniques derived from Petri net (PN), including Production Flow Schema (PFS), are used in a PFS/PN modeling approach. This approach has been proven efficient for hierarchical description, analysis and control of DES. The system is approached in different levels of abstraction: a conceptual model which is developed through PFS technique and a functional model which is developed in PN. Finally, it is presented a particular implementation of the proposed procedure to define a manufacturing service, in which different and specific issues of distributed manufacturing activities are considered.