Process Analysis for Communicating Systems Engineering Workgroups

The Industry 4.0 vision of flexible manufacturing systems in production systems engineering, depends on the collaboration of domain experts coming from a variety of engineering disciplines. These domain experts often depend on the explicit representation of knowledge on relationships between products and production systems. However, in multi-disciplinary systems engineering organizations, process analysis and improvement has traditionally focused on work in one specific discipline rather than on the collaboration of several workgroups. In this chapter, we investigate requirements for the product/ion (i.e., product and production process) aware analysis of engineering processes to improve the engineering process across workgroups. We consider the following three aspects: (1) engineering process analysis methods; (2) artifact and data modeling approaches, from business informatics and from production systems engineering; and (3) persistent representation of product/ion-aware engineering knowledge and data. We extend existing work on business process analysis methods and BPMN 2.0 to address their limitations of capabilities for product/ion-aware process analysis. We evaluate the contributions in a case study with domain experts at a large production system engineering company. We conclude that improved product/ion-aware knowledge representation facilitates traceable design decisions as foundation for advanced quality assurance in the engineering process.