Industrial Machines as a Service: A Model Based on Embedded Devices and Web Services

Abstract

-In the last years, the maturity reached by the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) has led us to an scenario which is suitable for facing the new business models, arisen as a consequence of the adoption of the Internet as the basic development infrastructure: strengthen of relationships between organizations and also between each organization and its customers, access to new markets, new competition models and manufacturing procedures. The research presented in this article is centred in the last field, concretely in a new method which allows an integral eBusiness model, compatible with current proposals and capable of overcoming the physical and logistical constraints that prevent the manufacturing processes from taking advantage of the whole potential offered by new technologies in this field, which are already being used by other business areas.

Industrial Machines as a Service: Modelling industrial machinery processes

“…The two initial stages (physical normalisation and normalisation of service middleware) have been studies in greater detail in previous works [12]. In this paper we present a brief summary of these in order to facilitate comprehension, however it is really the third stage (concerned with modelling of the manufacturing process) on which we concentrate here.…”

“…In [12] we propose to take of advantage of these same techniques to raise the level of abstraction of the production elements to enterprise level so that the integration of resources, processes and in general business logic occurs in a natural and transparent manner within the existing business models. This work establishes the need for a process which we have called: industrial machinery normalisation process.…”

Service model for the management of industrial environments. Dynamic reconfiguration of production elements

“…Along the same lines, [9] the use of WebServices is proposed as a normalised means of accessing functionalities of the devices and for integrating them in planning systems for business resources (ERP). In [10] it is proposed to benefit from these same techniques in order to raise the level of abstraction of the production elements to the business level in such a way that the integration of resources, processes and in general business logic is produced in a natural and transparent manner within the existing business models. Finally, also within the framework of European research projects there are some important initiatives which support the interest along these lines, with significant results which have advanced towards Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and embedded devices in industrial machinery as valid technologies [11] [12] [13].…”

Cloud Agile Manufacturing

“…This gap is caused mainly by the high stiffness of manufacturing elements located in the lower levels of production [4]. In previous work we have proposed a vision of Industrial Machinery and Service (se call IMaaS -Industrial Machinery as a Service) [5] [6], integrated under a paradigm of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This proposal has been successful to solve the problem of gap mentioned, enabling you to model the manufacturing processes of industrial machinery as a part of the System of Business Process Management (BPMS) [3].…”

“…In this way, processes can be defined independently of the physical structure of the factory and can be adapted flexibly to existing resources at all times. To do this, the proposal is based on the synergy between IMaaS model [6] together with the incorporation of knowledge in the definition of processes and services involved, using ontologies described in [7] [8]. This proposal is called Semantic Industrial Machinery and Service (SIMaaS -Semantic IMaaS).…”