On Enhancing Communication of Manufacturing Service Capability Information

A manufacturing service capability (MSC) model is essential for correct communication of MSC information between customers and suppliers. MSC information elicits service details such as locations, areas of specialization, capacities, certifications, software capabilities, and material processing capabilities. This information is carried by semantics embedded in the MSC model’s schema and MSC descriptions, which are the schema-compliant instances representing suppliers’ capabilities. Presently, as in the case of web portal-enabled communications between customers and suppliers, this information is communicated using models that provide limited semantic precision. These models are also proprietary to specific industry communities; hence, access to MSC information across communities is also limited. In this paper, we describe deployment analysis of the merged-model-based semantic mediation approach to enhance access to and precision of proprietary MSC models that are encoded in relational databases (RDBs). The approach relies on a merged ontology, mappings between the Web Ontology Language(OWL) encoded proprietary MSC models and the merged ontology, and OWLenabled description logic inferences. We describe the analysis with an example manufacturing sourcing use case explaining the semantic mediation steps enabled by the approach. We characterize the first step that encodes the proprietary MSC model in OWL using three alternative encoding conventions and discuss their corresponding resulting behaviors associated with the semantic mediation. An analysis of the behaviors leads to a conclusion that the ontology-oriented encoding convention is most suitable of the three alternatives for semantic mediation in OWL. In the next step, development of the mapping ontologies between the OWL-encoded proprietary models and the merged ontology is discussed. Then, in the deployment stage, it is shown that the semantic mediation can be deployed in two ways, namely, single community, which shares same proprietary MSC model, and multi-community, which uses differing proprietary MSC models. The deployment analysis shows that the single community deployment introduces shared MSC semantics for precise and greater access to MSC information within the community while the multi-community deployment introduces shared MSC semantics for interoperable access to MSC information across the communities.