Virtualization for Manufacturing Web Services: a WS-RF approach

Enterprise integration is a top priority for many organizations attempting to streamline business processes, coordinate disparate functions, improve corporate responsiveness to customers and partners and optimize supply chains in an effort to improve productivity. Web services orientation has appeared as a new paradigm for realizing enterprise integration, and fundamental to the service orientation is the virtualization. In the service orientation approach, every thing in a considered environment (devices, equipments, processes and applications) is required to be virtualized as a Web service. Via a virtualization, all manufacturing systems are exposed as Web services, and they can offer their services and functionality in a standard Web service environment. In this paper, we adopt Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) as a major mechanism for virtualization and for illustration purpose, we use WSRF to virtualize an AGV. Different views of an AGV are defined via virtualization. WSRF.Net is then used to develop the prototype wherein the different views of the AGV are depicted as WS Resources. Different parameters of a view are accessed and operations are performed on the AGV through the web service.