Knowledge-Based Decision Making in a Cyber-Physical Production Scenario

Market requirements such as shortened product life cycles as well as the increasing number of variants up to customized products lead to more complexity in production systems. Digitalization initiatives, such as the vision of “Industrie 4.0”, try to cope with this complexity by means of smart products and smart machines that are equipped with their own decision making capabilities for steering flexible ad-hoc production processes. In this paper, we discuss the use of semantic technologies together with cyber-physical systems for integrating decision making into smart production machinery. We report on the experiences with a prototypical realization based on Semantic Web technology on top of a complex cyber-physical production demo system at the Fraunhofer IGCV in Augsburg.