On the Updating of Domain OWL Models at Runtime in Factory Automation Systems

Software agents controlling production devices must maintain an up-to-date view of the physical world state in order to efficiently reason and plan their actions. Especially in a factory automation system, the world state undergoes rapid evolution. To enable accurate decision-making, the world view must constantly be synchronized with the changes. This paper discusses two approaches to updating the world view based on event notifications sent by web services representing production devices in a manufacturing system. One approach requires that a set of update rules is separately specified, whereas the other involves automatically deriving the update rules from the semantic web service descriptions. While this paper specifically focuses on the factory automation domain, both of the approaches presented are applicable to other domains as well. The main assumptions are that the domain is composed of world-altering web services, which provide adequate service interfaces to detect changes in their state, and that all relevant changes in the overall domain state can be directly derived from the service state changes.