Manufacturing process modelling using process specification language

Abstract

The manufacturing process is one of the important processes in a product’s life cycle. The sharing of manufacturing process information among different functional application systems, such as process planning, manufacturing simulation, manufacturing execution and project management, has become difficult to implement due to the growing complexity of the manufacturing information of product, process, resource and plant. A unified representation of manufacturing process information for all applications can enable convenient integration between different application systems. The development of manufacturing-related ontology and the Process Specification Language (PSL) has provided a formal definition and structure of semantic concepts for the capture and the exchange of manufacturing information. This paper presents a manufacturing process information modelling method which builds a standard, complete and exact definition of manufacturing process data by applying current PSL specifications. New extensions of the concepts of the manufacturing process and the types of relationship for describing activities, materials and resources in a process are identified and developed. The completeness and adaptability of activity relation of the proposed manufacturing process information representation is verified using mathematical induction under a variety of complex manufacturing process situations. The ability of the modelling method in expressing complex process information is demonstrated by a machining process example.