Extending the Formal Process Description towards Consistency in Product/ion-Aware Modeling

In discrete manufacturing, basic and detail engineering workgroups collaborate to design a cyber-physical production system. Product/ion-aware modeling recognizes requirements coming from the product and from the production process for designing a production resource. These requirements imply consistency dependencies between product, production process, and resource (PPR) model elements. Unfortunately, there is only limited support for modeling consistency dependencies between PPR model elements and for defining abstract types in addition to concrete instances of PPR model elements. In this paper, we build on the PPR modeling capabilities of the VDI/VDE 3682 guideline, the Formal Process Description (FPD). We propose extensions for representing the refinement of types and instances as well as consistency dependencies between PPR model elements. We evaluate the FPD language extensions in a feasibility study with domain experts at a large production system engineering company for discrete manufacturing. The main result is that the domain experts found the extended FPD useful and usable for representing PPR consistency as a foundation for making design decisions.