An engineering framework for Service-Oriented Intelligent Manufacturing Systems

• A complete software development method is presented for Service Oriented Intelligent Manufacturing Systems.
• The software development method provides a CASE tool that automatically generates executable code for the system execution.
• A specific and complete set of service guidelines for the development of Service Oriented Intelligent Manufacturing Systems is provided.
• The completeness of the approach is evaluated under two views: an empirical by means of case studies; and a qualitative analysis.

Nowadays fully integrated enterprises are being replaced by business networks in which each participant provides others with specialized services. As a result, the Service Oriented Manufacturing Systems emerges. These systems are complex and hard to engineer. The main source of complexity is the number of different technologies, standards, functions, protocols, and execution environments that must be integrated in order to realize them. This paper proposes a framework and associated engineering approach for assisting the system developers of Service Oriented Manufacturing Systems. The approach combines multi-agent system with Service Oriented Architectures for the development of intelligent automation control and execution of manufacturing systems.