Toward an ontology-based architecture for cloud manufacturing

Abstract

In this study we introduce a first step to build a Cloud Manufacturing architecture. Cloud Manufacturing is an emerging paradigm in which dynamically scalable and virtualized resources are provided to the users as services over the Internet. Our architecture will serve as a platform for mapping users and manufacturing resources' providers with the aim of enhancing collaboration within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) by reducing costs and development time. Since some vendors may use different descriptions of their services we believe that semantic web technologies like ontologies are robust tools for mapping vendors' descriptions and users' requests in order to find the suited service. Our ontology is under development and will include concepts from holons, PLM and Cloud Computing.