Service Entities in Manufacturing Networks

Abstract

Service Entities have been proposed as a relevant approach that may help to support structural and functional Collaborative Networks modeling and deployment, especially when they are engineered inside Virtual Breeding Environments. This work is intended to explore the suitability of such approach to next-generation manufacturing networks. By means of a supporting case, the paper identifies main service entities of the problem domain, exemplifies how service interfaces can be defined and how can they be used to compose abstract collaborative processes definitions.