Volunteer Based Search Engine for Holonic Manufacturing Services

摘要

This chapter presents a framework for intelligent search of web services that expose the offer request management functionality for intelligent manufacturing systems. Currently research is being done in the area of Semantic Web Service discovery, which involves a search engine that indexes WSDL files, and UDDI repositories. A novel concept of volunteer based search is introduced, in which the search criteria is passed to the manufacturing system, to allow a self-assessment against the search criteria. This volunteer based approach is specifically designed for the cases in which the search engine cannot compare the search criteria against the target service, so it cannot determine the matching. The chapter presents the architecture and design of the web service provided by the manufacturing system and of a web service search engine implementing the volunteer based search concept. Some specific issues arising from this search approach are discussed, such as time available to decide and respond to an offer and offer invalidation. A locking mechanism helping to overcome this issue is given. The chapter also presents the advantages of integration of the manufacturing system with SOA and BPEL processes.