The PRIME Semantic Language: Plug and Produce in Standard- based Manufacturing Production Systems

Nowadays manufacturing production systems are becoming more and more responsive in order to succeed in ahighly unstable environment. The capability of a production system to effectively and efficiently adapt and evolveto face the changing requirements – imposed by volatile and dynamic global markets – is a necessary conditionto enable manufacturing enterprises to be agile. Since the agility of a manufacturing enterprise is always limitedby the agility of its own building blocks than it needs to be spread over the whole enterprise including the operationand information technologies (OT/IT). Turning to production systems, one of the significant challenges isrepresented by the possibility to provide easy and rapid (re-)configuration of their internal components and/orprocesses. Innovative technologies and paradigms have been explored during the years that combined with theincreasing advancement in manufacturing technologies enable the implementation of the “plug and produce”paradigm. The “plug and produce” paradigm is the foundation of any agile production system, since to be agile itis inevitably required to reduce the installation and (re-)engineering activities time – changing/adapting the systemto new requirements – while promoting configuration rather than programming. Therefore, the “plug andproduce” paradigm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for implementing agile production systems. Modernproduction systems are typically known for their plethora of heterogeneous component/equipment. In this complexscenario, the implementation of the “plug and produce” paradigm implies the existence of a well-definedontological model to support components/equipment abstraction with the objective to allow interactions,collaboration and knowledge sharing between them. The PRIME semantic language specifies the semanticstructure for the knowledge models and overall system communication language.