An agent-based system for orchestration support of web service-enabled devices in discrete manufacturing systems

New trends in the automation industry indicate that manufacturing companies can improve their response to the constantly changing market demands for customized products by adopting the design principles from the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in their control and automation systems. With this goal in mind, the EU FP6 IST project Service-Oriented Cross-layer infRAstructure for Distributed smart Embedded devices (SOCRADES), researched the creation of manufacturing systems with distributed control architectures, where Web Services (WS)s are pushed all the way down to the device level. The results of this research allowed us to expose the functionality of production equipment by means of WSs and use them according to the SOA principles; however, it was found that it is necessary to count with a mechanism for ensuring smart and dynamic composition of these WSs on the factory floor. It is presumed that agent-based technology has the potential of providing the required level of intelligence, if it can be properly combined with WSs on manufacturing systems. This article describes the specification of a WS-enabled Decision Support System (DSS) integrated by a set of software agents. The agent-based system presented here is capable of supporting the dynamic composition and orchestration of WSs exposed by control devices on discrete manufacturing systems. In addition to the DSS specification, this paper also introduces a physical scenario which was used to test the proposed system. The developments and results presented here were also done within the framework of the SOCRADES project.