Measuring Similarity for Manufacturing Process Models

Abstract

In manufacturing companies, it is vital to manage their manufacturing processes in order to ensure high quality of products and manufacturing consistency. Because so-called smart factories interconnect machines and acquire processing data, the business process management (BPM) approach can enrich the capability of manufacturing operation management. In this paper, we propose BPM-based similarity measures for manufacturing processes and apply them to the processes of a real factory. In addition to the structural similarity of the existing studies, we suggest a production-related operation similarity. Our contribution is considered on the assumption that a manufacturing company adopts the BPM approach and it operates a variety of manufacturing process models. The similarity measures enable the company to automatically search and reutilize models or parts of models within a repository of manufacturing process models.

The Syntax of a Multi-Level Production Process Modeling Language

“…Companies mostly use manufacturing process charts and BOMs to specify production processes, but none of these specifications provide enough data to facilitate automatic execution. BOM specifications are not enough to understand a production flow [17]. On the other hand, Bill of Materials and Operations (BOMO) [18] specifications cover the production flow, but are insufficient to specify selection and iteration patterns or smart resources.…”

“…On the other hand, Bill of Materials and Operations (BOMO) [18] specifications cover the production flow, but are insufficient to specify selection and iteration patterns or smart resources. There is also Korean manufacturing process chart standard KS A 3002 [19], but a tooling support and a possibility to automatically execute models are missing [17]. Unified Modeling Language (UML) activity diagrams are used to describe production processes, but models are not suitable for the automatic execution, they are not intuitive for process designers and they could be complex [20].…”

“…Zor et al proposed BPMN extensions to model production processes [22], however it is difficult to model a material flow [23] and the whole context of production domain is not covered due to the absence of uniformity [17]. BPMN extensions are also proposed by Ahn and Chang for production process similarity measurements [17], however it is not possible to model selection and iteration patterns or to specify smart resources. According to Lütjen and Rippel [23], some languages like DELMIA Process Engineer, Systems Modeling Language (SysML) and Petri nets lack in possibility to specify the material flow.…”

A Similarity-Based Hierarchical Clustering Method for Manufacturing Process Models

“…Table 2. BPMN notations for manufacturing process models [2] Notation Element type Description Figure 2. Operation process chart for a thermocouple probe product.…”

“…Manufacturing companies could also benefit from the well-defined methodologies and process-centric engineering practices of the BPM approach for optimizing their manufacturing processes. In particular, various analysis techniques which come from the BPM research field may be fruitful for efficiently managing a large set of manufacturing processes [2].…”