Towards an Integrated SOA-based Architecture for Interoperable and Responsive Manufacturing Systems

Manufacturing systems need to integrate information from several sources, manage their business processes and coordinate the shop floor in order to meet the schedule at reduced costs. Holonic manufacturing has been proposed to solve these problems and has been normally implemented using agents. However, these implementations are not widely used due to their cost and limited interoperability. In this work, an approach that combines a service-oriented architecture with a multi-agent system is proposed. A list of rules is designed for deciding how to implement each holon, and is applied to the level 3 activities of ISA-95. The adoption of an enterprise service bus is suggested for decoupling service consumers and producers, and using a complex event processing engine is recommended to detect trends from the day-to-day operations of a plant. This approach is then applied to a grinded ceramic tile manufacturing plant.