UberManufacturing: A Goal-Driven Collaborative Industrial Manufacturing Marketplace

In this paper, we present the application of an automatic service composition system in the context of collaborative industrial manufacturing. We discuss how our system could support a production-as-a-service paradigm and present the architecture we created to realize this potential. The basis of our approach are embedded semantic descriptions of a production cell's available resources (machines and human workers). Using these descriptions and given a specification of the product to be manufactured, our system is able to derive a collaborative plan that composes its available resources to achieve that manufacturing goal. This ability to flexibly reconfigure industrial equipment in a goal-driven way is becoming increasingly important in the industrial domain, where mass customization leads to ever smaller lot sizes and potentially even to a lot-size-one world. It can revolutionize the way we think about manufacturing: instead of highly optimized integrated high-volume production lines, this would allow individual manufacturing cells to offer their capabilities as a service and compete with other cells in a paradigm that we refer to as UberManufacturing.