MTComm: A Semantic Ontology Based Internet Scale Communication Method of Manufacturing Services in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud

A Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) is an Internet-of-Things (IoT) enabled manufacturing framework that facilitates monitoring and operation of manufacturing machine tools remotely through the integration of IoT, cyber-physical systems, cloud computing, and advanced manufacturing technologies. To achieve this, it is necessary to develop a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet in order to access and manage manufacturing resources from the cloud. This paper presents a semantic ontology based Internet scale communication method of manufacturing services named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) in a CPMC to enable manufacturing with various physically connected machines from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. This paper presents design of an agent-adapter architecture of the communication method of exchanging manufacturing services across Internet, a semantic ontological representation of manufacturing machines and services, and specification of the ontology based MTComm method. It is the first Internet scale manufacturing service communication method of enabling manufacturing operations over the internet in addition to monitoring manufacturing services. MTComm is a significant improvement over the MTConnect, a widely popular communication method of manufacturing services which allows only monitoring machine tools over the Internet. It is implemented and tested in a testbed of the CPMC to analyze its performance in multiple manufacturing application scenarios. The experiments demonstrate excellent feasibility of monitoring and performing manufacturing operations over the Internet.