An Automated Semantic Planning Framework applied in a Cloud Manufacturing Domain

Cloud manufacturing is a new manufacturing concept, where manufacturing companies offer their production resources in a networked environment. It is of vital importance to match capacities with available customer orders. However, a unifying approach, able to provide appropriate resource allocation as well as to facilitate the general understanding in such distributed and heterogeneous environments is required. This paper presents an automatic mechanism that integrates semantic representations of a cloud manufacturing system with a planner that generates a concrete structured sequence of tasks, which map production capacities and required order constraints. The proposed Semantic Planning Framework is evaluated using a generic dataset to assess the flexibility and generalizability of the system.