Requirements and languages for the semantic representation of manufacturing systems

•The requirements that the languages for the semantic and ontological modelling of the manufacturing domain should present are collected.•A review of the manufacturing domain semantic modelling is performed.•A possible role of ontologies in the manufacturing domain is envisioned, that is to be used as knowledge bases that support Service oriented Control Architectures based on Web Services within the open automation paradigm.•An industrial case is presented that shows the possible use in a real context of the ontology for manufacturing domain.

In the last years, attention has been devoted to the development of ontologies, which are ICT conceptual models allowing a formal and shared representation of a particular domain of discourse, and to the use of these representations in a variety of contexts, among which also the industrial engineering can be counted. Within the industrial engineering field, the manufacturing domain has not yet seen a wide application of ontologies. This paper firstly shows the use of ontologies for the semantic annotation of a Web Service-based architecture for the control of manufacturing systems; and then contributes to the research field of manufacturing domain ontologies by proposing a thorough literature review and analysis of the available languages supporting such objective. The paper collects the main requirements that semantic languages must meet to be used in the manufacturing domain with the outlined purpose. In fact, the available semantic languages are several and characterized by different features: the paper identifies the most proper ones for the manufacturing domain representation thanks to their analysis against the main requirements. Lastly, the paper shows how the discussed topics are deployed in a real industrial example.