Towards the encapsulation and decentralisation of OKD-MES services within embedded devices

Traditionally, the resources of embedded devices which are employed for process control at shop floors were resource constrained. However, advances in embedded system technologies permit the enhancement of the processing and storage capabilities of embedded devices. Therefore, semantic descriptions of manufacturing systems can now be hosted and computed at the device level. This fact permits the creation of a decentralised solution for controlling processes at the lowest level of the manufacturing enterprises and the reduction in the time and effort requirements for the configuration and information exchange. The eScop project presented the Open Knowledge-Driven Manufacturing Execution System (OKD-MES) solution, which enables monitoring and controlling production systems openly and allows runtime re-configurability of interconnected industrial equipment and services. This research work presents how part of the OKD-MES functionality can be handled at lower level. More precisely, the OKD-MES representation and management of knowledge can be decentralised and handled at the shop floor level, where the industrial machines are connected to devices that are capable of controlling the execution of processes. The main objective of this paper is to describe a decentralised vision for the OKD-MES framework, which is a centric solution in terms of knowledge management. Moreover, the article also discusses some of the advantages to be gained from decentralising the management of knowledge model semantic descriptions.