Formalized Information Representation for Intelligent Products in Service-Oriented Manufacturing

The Intelligent Product concept has been proposed almost a decade ago, gaining considerable traction in manufacturing enterprises as it helps aligning the information flow with the material flow even in the simplest implementations. In advanced applications it can provide support for executing complex algorithms allowing local decision making upon collective reasoning or individual and autonomous selection of the manufacturing operations. In the context of service-oriented manufacturing systems there are new requirements for intelligent products, such as standards adoption and SOA capabilities. This paper proposes a classification of intelligent products from a SOA integration point of view and introduces a formalized data structure for intelligent products in the form of a XSD schema for XML representation. The data flow during manufacturing is discussed in the context of lead time and lag time between operations in the product recipe with the goal to enable ETA estimation of the product and the product batch. An example is presented for assembly of an H- shaped product, focusing on representation of operation dependencies and lag time in XML format proposed.