Proceedings of the First Process Specification Language (PSL) Roundtable

In April, 1997, the Process Specification Language (PSL) Project held a Roundtable discussion at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The goals of the Roundtable was to assemble key champions and stakeholders of various approaches towards process representation in order to discuss the relative merits to reach consensus on a language architecture and to establish a technical approach for proceeding. It was agreed that the language architecture should be based upon a formal semantic foundation, upon which would be layered a number of syntactic mappings, each with one or more presentations. In discussions about principal concepts of any process representation, it was agreed that “process” and “participant (resource)” are basic. A number of possible other concepts were suggested, but no consensus was reached. Additionally, five potential uses for the PSL were identified and discussed. They were: 1) provide a description of a process that has already occurred; 2) provide a “recipe” (prescription) describing how a process can occur; 3) provide a semantic model to determine concepts and establish the scope of systems; 4) enable interoperability between manufacturing systems, enterprise systems, and/or AI systems; 5) enable technology transfer between manufacturing and other disciplines. Finally, three teams were formed to define: • A set of scenarios to support the identification and definition of semantic concepts and to provide potential uses of the language; • A semantic description covering a small subset of the core language requirements; • Three syntactic interpretations of that semantic description, mapping to object-oriented, KIF, and constraint-based presentations. A relational presentation was also