An analysis of requirements for specifying manufacturing engineering and business processes (original) (raw)

A wide range of manufacturing software applications deal with the manipulation and expression of collections of activities. Examples include manufacturing process planning, production scheduling, simulation, project management, workflow, business process reengineering, and product realization process modeling. While each of these applications serves a specific audience and need and focuses on particular aspects of a process, much could be gained by sharing process information among applications. One of the primary obstacles to such integration is the lack of any common representation of what is really the underlying concept of process. The objective of the work described here is to investigate the feasibility of a unifying specification of process that is applicable to all of the above manufacturing applications, yet powerful and robust enough to meet each set of requirements. The results of the first phase of the work-that of researching the process specification requirements for design/manufacturing process life-cycle applications-are described and analyzed. Alternative views of the process specification requirements provide the ability to better understand them, to ensure their completeness, and to envision the structure and approach of a future, generic process specification language (PSL). Task, resource, product, and time are identified and analyzed as the fundamental aspects of process, offering insights to understanding, analyzing, and improving manufacturing and business processes.

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