Ontology integration for advanced manufacturing collaboration in cloud platforms

Advances in the field of cloud computing and networking have led to rapid development and market growth in areas such as online retail, gaming and healthcare. In the field of advanced manufacturing however, the impact has been significantly lesser than expected due to limitations in cloud platforms for fostering community engagement. To address this problem, we study a new cloud-based architecture that provides Platform-asa-Service (PaaS) management capabilities to the manufacturing community for delivering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) “Apps” to their customers. Our architecture aims at supporting an “App Marketplace” that thrives on agile development, organic collaboration and scalable sales of next generation manufacturing Apps requiring high-performance simulation and modeling. Towards realizing the vision of the above architecture, our paper involves investigation and implementation of an Ontology Service that interoperates with other common web services related to resource brokering and accounting. Our Ontology Service uses principles of mapping and merging to translate a manufacturing App's collaboration requirements to suitable resource specifications on public cloud platforms. Integrated resultant ontology can be queried to provision the required resource parameters such as amount of memory/storage, number of processing units, and network protocol configurations needed for deployment of an App. We validate the effectiveness of our Ontology Service using the Protégé framework in a pilot testbed of a real-world “WheelSim” App in the NSF GENI Cloud platform. Our ontology integration results show benefits to an App developer in terms of: optimal user experience, lower design time and lower cost/simulation.