Process-Driven Approach within the Engineering Domain by Combining Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) with Process Engines

Abstract

Digitization within the framework of Industry 4.0 is considered the biggest and fastest driver of change in history of manufacturing industry. While the size of a company is becoming less essential, the ability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and new technologies is more important than ever. This trend particularly applies to the companies’ software landscapes, where individual sub-processes and services must be orchestrated, seamlessly integrated, and iteratively renewed according to the ever-increasing user requirements. However, inflexible, closed monolithic software applications as well as self-programmed stand-alone tools that are difficult to integrate are still predominant in the engineering domain. A complete reimplementation of existing, proprietary engineering tools and their integration into monolithic applications of large software providers is often not economically feasible, especially for small and medium-sized machinery and plant manufacturers. In this context, the so-called Process-Driven Approach (PDA) offers a sustainable and tool-neutral opportunity for process and tool orchestration, enabling an easy integration of individual software applications by consistent utilization of the separation of concerns principle. The PDA, originating from business informatics, is mainly based on the standardized and machine-executable visual modeling language Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Using the semantic enhancements found in version 2.0, BPMN is not just used to model the business processes but also to model and execute the integration processes between different systems. After the PDA has already been successfully applied to large-scale projects in business informatics, it is now being transferred to the engineering domain. As shown in this paper, PDA allows to orchestrate the different processes in engineering and to integrate the underlying software tools, such as e-mail or spreadsheet applications, engineering tools, or custom microservices, using standardized interfaces like REST API. In doing so, engineering processes can be made more transparent, monitored, and optimized by means of appropriate key figures. The concept is validated by a prototypical implementation of a minimum functional PDA architecture for the engineering domain.