Kirkman Enterprises

General Information

The Manufacturing Service Description Language (MSDL) is a formal ontology for describing manufacturing capabilities at various levels of abstraction including the supplier-level, process-level, and machine-level.  The concept and design of MSDL comes from the work of Farhad Ameri of Texas State University.  The immediate focus of this work is composed of two parts. 

First, is the development of the MSDL ontology, including adding realistic information about industry and product areas, types of materials, processes and machine tools, and manufacuting suppliers.  This information is compiled from different sources.  The heirarchy of industry areas is taken from part of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).  The product heirarchy is taken from the United Nations Provisional Central Product Classification.  Information about suppliers were taken from live profiles from Thomasnet.com; those profiles in their textual descriptions are available on this page. 

The second focus is the development of a semantic search engine that allows a user to submit a query and retrieve a ranked list of suppliers matching the query.  For example, if a potential customer needs to have a part manufactured, they would create a query in the search engine reflecting the requirements needed to make the part.  The search engine returns a list ranked by a score of how similar the supplier's advertised services match the customer's query.

After the semantic search engine was completed work moved to other avenues of using the ontology and search engine.  Specifically, a multi-agent system was developed primarily for manufacturing supply chain management.  Using the JADE Framework, a multi-agent system was developed that allows agents representing manufacturing suppliers and RFQs for work to be done to enter the system.  A supply chain agent tracked the RFQ agents in the system and maintained supply chains that can fulfill the requirements of the RFQs.

MSD Ontology

MSDL Ontology
MSDL Video Tour (7MB .MP4 file)
MSDL Description Poster

Ontology and Search Engine

MSDL Search Engine Application (Demo video 5MB .MP4 file)
MSDL Search Engine User Manual
MSDL Search Engine Implementation 'White Paper'
Video tour of Java code for feature based similarity calculations (15MB .MP4 file)

Multi-Agent System

Digital Manufactuing Marketplace Demo video (3MB .MP4 file)

Other Related Projects

 "Feature Recognition - Machine Tool Selection" project (Demo video 6MB .MP4 file)