SWMRD: a Semantic Web-based manufacturing resource discovery system for cross-enterprise collaboration

As supply chains are becoming ever more global and agile in the modern manufacturing era, enterprises are increasingly dependent upon the efficient and effective discovery of shared manufacturing resources provided by their partners, wherever they are. Enterprises are thus faced with increasing challenges caused by the technical difficulties and ontological issues in manufacturing interoperability and integration over heterogeneous computing platforms. This paper presents a prototype intelligent system SWMRD (Semantic Web-based manufacturing resource discovery) for distributed manufacturing collaboration across ubiquitous virtual enterprises. Ontology-based annotation to the distributed manufacturing resources via a new, multidisciplinary manufacturing ontology is proposed on the semantic web to convert resources into machine understandable knowledge, which is a prelude to the meaningful resource discovery for cross-enterprise multidisciplinary collaboration. An ontology-based multi-level knowledge retrieval model is devised to extend the traditional information retrieval approaches based on keyword search, with integrated capabilities of graph search, semantic search, fuzzy search and automated reasoning to realise the intelligent discovery of manufacturing resources, e.g. to facilitate more flexible, meaningful, accurate and automated resource discovery. A case study for intelligent discovery of manufacturing resources is used to demonstrate the practicality of the developed system.