Towards a seamless integration between process modeling descriptions at Business and Production levels - work in progress

Abstract

To fulfill increasing requirements in the manufacturing sector, companies are faced with several challenges. Three major challenges have been identified regarding time-to-market, vertical feedback loops and level of automation. Grafchart, a graphical language aimed for supervisory control applications, can be used from the process-planning phase, through the implementation phase and all the way to the phase for execution of the process control logics, on the lower levels of the Automation triangle. Work in progress is examining if the same concepts could be used on the higher levels of the Automation triangle as well. By splitting the execution engine and the visualization engine of Grafchart various different visualization tools could potentially be used, however connected by the shared Grafchart semantics. Traditional Business languages, e.g. BPMN, could therefore continue to be used for the process-planning phase whereas traditional production languages, e.g. Grafchart or other SFC-like languages, could be used for the execution. Since they are connected through the semantics, advantages regarding the three identified challenges could be achieved; time-to-market could be reduced, the time delays in the vertical feedback loops could be reduced by allowing KPI visualization, and the level of automation could be increased.

The Future: Obstacles and Opportunities

“…A minimal requirement for supporting quick and easy sketching of production processes is the availability of graphical modelling languages, based on their ability to facilitate human understanding (Gerber et al 2014). For example, the IEC 61131-3 standard contains three graphical languages for structuring and programming PLC code specifying low-level process control.…”