Towards semantic self-description of industrial devices and control system interfaces

Information systems in production environments control and gather data in operations integrating multiple devices and systems with various communication interfaces. With the development of smart industrial environments, needing to connect heterogeneous components into systems communicating over the Internet, integration and interoperability challenges emerge. Self-description is regarded as the capability of devices and systems to include descriptions expressing the offered services and information exchange. Further by semantic descriptions they can provide interpretable, meaningful information how to use the service interface but also how to interpret the capabilities and data. The paper presents a Semantic Web technology based approach to harmonize access and utilization of devices and control systems in distributed and dynamic environments. For this two standards based ontologies are developed: an industrial plant model for hierarchical structure and a state model for operational information of system components. To demonstrate the architecture and developed models the approach is applied to the components of a small-scale example industrial process.