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 HORSE Project: The Application of Business Process Management for Flexibility in Smart Manufacturing

“…Prades et al [59] make the case for integration between enterprise resource planning (on level 4 of the functional hierarchy defined in the IEC 62264 standard) and manufacturing operations management (on level 3), by using Business Process Model & Notation (BPMN) for process modelling in both levels. Gerber et al [60] also pursue integration, but instead opt for translation from level 4 BPMN models to level 3 sequential function charts. Comparatively, subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM) has been demonstrated as an enabler of integration in smart manufacturing [61][62][63].…”

S-BPM in the Production Industry

“…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.…”

A network-based manufacturing model for spiral bevel gears

“…Especially, the informatization during these processes has not been solved, which was thought as one of the key challenges the manufacturing sectors had to face today (Gerber et al 2014), thus it is still hard to improve the machining efficiency and tooth surface quality. As a result, it is urgent and crucial to promote research focusing on network-based man- ufacturing and its related technologies to satisfy the demand of development for modern spiral bevel gears with high accuracy and machining efficiency.…”