Towards a seamless integration between process modeling descriptions at business and production levels: work in progress

To fulfill increasing requirements in the manufacturing sector, companies are facing several challenges. Three major challenges have been identified regarding time-to-market, vertical feedback loops, and level of automation. Grafchart, a graphical language aimed for supervisory control applications, can be used from the process-planning phase, through the implementation phase and all the way to the phase for execution of the process control logics, on the lower levels of the automation triangle along the life cycle axis. This work in progress examines that the same process-based engineering approach can be used on the higher levels of the automation triangle along the enterprise axis interconnecting both axes. By splitting the execution engine and the visualization engine of Grafchart various different visualization tools could potentially be used, however connected by the shared Grafchart semantics. Traditional Business languages (e.g. BPMN) could therefore continue to be used for the process-planning phase whereas traditional production languages (e.g. Grafchart or other sequential function charts-like languages) could be used for the execution. Since they are connected through the semantics, advantages regarding the three identified challenges could be achieved: time-to-market could be reduced, the time delays in the vertical feedback loops could be reduced by Key Performance Indicator visualization and eventing, and the level of automation could be increased.