A Cross-Disciplinary Process Modelling Language for Validating Reconfigured Production Processes

Abstract

Modelling and reconfiguration of production processes require knowledge across different domains. This in-depth knowledge is necessary to avoid possible side effects that could threaten the production plant, the workpiece or the worker. Therefore, process modelling approaches allow adding additional data to the steps of a process. Such additions can be constraints, which need to be fulfilled before a step can be executed. Upon reconfiguration of production processes, these constraints need to be validated to ensure that the objective of the process is still met. However, this task demands expertise in the field of process modelling as well as in the domain of the production process and the production plant. To the best of our knowledge, state-of-the-art production process modelling approaches are unable to determine the semantic validity of a reconfigured production process. In this paper, we introduce a domain-specific modelling language dedicated to model and validate constraints between production steps.With this approach, we aim to assist the operator in reconfiguring production processes. We evaluate this approach in three case studies and show that our approach can detect violated constraints in production processes.