Conceiving the model-driven smart factory

Abstract

Manufacturing processes are undergoing major challenges to achieve the Smart Factory vision such as to increase systematic processes reuse and improve understandability of complex structures. However, those challenges recall closely those of software processes which have been successfully targeted by model-driven engineering techniques such as domain-specific modeling languages, modeling abstractions based on view-points, model-based formal analysis and automated model transformations. The goal of this paper is to present a research agenda to integrate those techniques in manufacturing processes to achieve the Smart Factory vision. We first survey manufacturing approaches that are based on the ISA-95 and BPMN standards. Then, we propose model-driven solutions to complement those approaches.