Modeling business motivation and underlying processes for RAMI 4.0-aligned cyber-physical production systems

Industry 4.0 is one of the most prominent initiatives towards the vision of smart manufacturing to foster efficiency and synergy among suppliers, producers, and customers. It will transform the production systems into a smart, fully integrated, and optimized cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) based on technology enablers such as Internet of Things (IoT). Moreover, the availability of a wide range of data and information in the context of CPPS provides a huge possibility to create novel business opportunities. However, for these business opportunities to materialize successfully there is an evident need to have an efficient communication and clear visualization of the new strategies and the underlying operational process among all the stakeholders involved in the manufacturing value chain. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach for creating and communicating business strategies (mission, goals, and tactics) and bridging the gap between the business strategies and corresponding operational processes using Business Motivation Model (BMM) and Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN) respectively. Concretely, we do the following, (i) create BMM models to communicate business ideas and connect corresponding business tactics to the processes models in BPMN, (ii) simulate processes to check achievable KPIs corresponding to different strategies (modeled in BMM), and (iii) define organizational units in BMM that perform tasks modeled in BPMN. We illustrate our approach through an exemplar case study about production of plastic cups by modeling high-level strategies and their underlying processes. To prove the feasibility of our work, we used and developed the BMM and BPMN plugins based on Eclipse Papyrus framework.