Patterns for integrating manufacturing product and process models

In building models for manufacturing, product information has most often been handled separately from process information. The integration of product and process models in a unified data model could provide the means by which information could be shared across a manufacturing enterprise throughout the system lifecycle from design to production. Recently, attempts have been made to integrate these two separate views of systems through identifying common data models. This paper relates description-driven systems to multi-layer architectures and reveals where existing design patterns facilitate the integration of product and process models and where patterns are missing or where existing patterns require enrichment for this integration. It reports on the construction of a so-called description-driven system which integrates product data management (PDM) and workflow management (WfM) data models through a common meta-model.