Towards an interoperable production system

Abstract

Electronic business demands from production companies to be interoperable with business partners. This requires them to integrate their subsystems and collaborate with their business partners. It is difficult to choose an implementation standard among different and competing standards and achieve full integration with business partners. Experience shows that the restriction to just one data format hardly ever works out. As all these standards are at the implementation level (Platform Specific Languages), the recommended solution is the specification of production system (processes and data for exchange) by using platform independent languages and applying a model driven architecture for the transformation of a platform independent model into a platform specific model. Data models are designed in UPCC (UML Profile for Core Components) neutral syntax notation, which is a metamodel for business information. This permits their subsequent representation in different syntactical data structures. For the modelling of production processes we propose the use of the BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) and the UPCC for designing the structure of production documents. This process specification can be transform into any implementation standard, such as ebXML for processes implementation and OAGIS BOD (Business Object Document) for document implementation. The overall approach is presented using an example of a technological process.