Badarinath Katti

• Decentralization is the norm of future smart production as it assists in contextual dynamic decision-making and thereby increases the flexibility required to produce highly customized products. When manufacturing business software is operated as a cloud-based solution, it experiences network latency and connectivity issues. To overcome these problems, the production control should be delegated to the manufacturing edge layer and hence, the argument of decentralization is even more applicable to this narrative. Semantic technologies, on the other hand, assist in discerning the meaning, reasoning and drawing inferences from the data. There are several specifications and frameworks to automate the discovery, orchestration and invocation of web services; the prominent are OWL-S and SAWSDL. This thesis adapts these frameworks for OPC UA, and consequently, the proposed semantically enriched OPC UA concept enables the edge layer to create flexible production orchestration plans in a manufacturing scenario controlled by cloud MES.