A reputation-based peer-to-peer architecture for semantic service discovery in distributed manufacturing environments

The rapidly increasing volume of today’s global manufacturing resources is demanding new approaches for resource location or discovery in distributed manufacturing environments. This article presents an ontology-based service-oriented peer-to-peer architecture for semantic discovery of manufacturing services across virtual enterprises in distributed manufacturing environments. Each enterprise exhibits as a peer that publishes sharable manufacturing services through its private service registry. The peers sharing similar ontological interests through ontological directory are clustered together, and the most reputed peer is elected as the super peer through multicriteria decision making among related trust parameters. All super peers form a reputed distributed hash table–based structured peer-to-peer overlay, and the leaf peers are communicated with and controlled by respective super peers. Then, a manufacturing service request can be first routed to the suitable super peer through structured indexing and further to its leaf peer through client/server communication, thus supporting efficient service discovery. The case study of the prototype system is presented to validate the applicability of the proposed approach for industrial application.