Enhancing Flexibility in Industry 4.0 Workflows: A Context-Aware Component for Dynamic Service Orchestration

Abstract

Manufacturing processes of the future will rely on standards for asset interoperability and service orchestration. The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) facilitates information exchange among Industry 4.0 assets, while standardized Business Processes enable workflow execution in manufacturing systems. Combining these technologies provides agility and scalability to manufacturing systems by incorporating asset services within business processes. Service orchestration involves coordinating multiple services, which must be dynamic during runtime to manage unforeseen situations that may arise during the manufacturing process. Context information plays a crucial role in identifying such scenarios and selecting the most suitable devices/services in response, and the Semantic Web accurately represents this information. This paper proposes a context-aware approach for service orchestration using industrial asset services. Our contributions include (1) a component for Context-Aware Service Re-Selection. (2) a domain-specific ontology (DeviceServiceOnt) for Semantic Web-based context representation. And, (3) validation of our proposal in a manufacturing setting where robots are responsible for dispatching and distributing materials within a warehouse. Opportunities for future work are also highlighted, with a primary focus on enhancing workflow dynamicity with context-aware capabilities.