A Meta-Model for Representing Consistency as Extension to the Formal Process Description

Abstract

In discrete manufacturing, basic and detail engineering workgroups need to collaborate to design highly automated cyber-physical production systems. Product/ion-awareness describes views and requirements coming from product and production process design, which are relevant to engineer production resources. These requirements imply strong dependencies between the product, the production process, and production resources (PPR). The Formal Process Description (FPD) provides basic concepts for modeling PPR knowledge, which support discrete manufacturing to some extent. In this paper, we introduce a meta-model that describes the structure of the FPD including a set of proposed extensions, focusing on expressing consistency dependencies on PPR relations, as a foundation for making design decisions traceable in the engineering process. In addition, the meta-model provides a clear description of how to model parallel or alternative process flows, a common use case in discrete manufacturing. The meta-model provides stakeholders with a clear description of the PPR modeling language (PPR-ML) and a rule set to check the validity of a model