Towards a Unified Flow Description Language for CPPSs: An Example with Material Flows

This paper presents a unified approach for repre-senting multiple domains alongside production in cyber-physical production systems (CPPSs) through domain-specific languages (DSLs). The approach is illustrated using material flows (MFs) as an example. The paper identifies requirements for DSLs in CPPSs and MFs, including concurrency, synchronization, constraints, and heterogeneity support. Subsequently, a plugin system is in-troduced for the existing Production Flow Description Language (PFDL), which allows users to incorporate additional domain-specific functionality in the form of plugins. To demonstrate this approach, we present the MF plugin, resulting in the combined PFDLMF. This showcases the reusability of such an approach and the easy integration of new CPPS domains. We envision the convergence of the PFDL with plugins towards a unified flow description language for CPPSs. A practical CPPS use-case demonstrates the expressiveness of the PFDLMF in modeling and executing complex MFs in an agent-based architecture.