Towards an Extended Interoperability Systemic Approach for Dynamic Manufacturing Networks: Role and Assessment of PLMStandards

Abstract

This paper aims at illustrating some limitations of the systemic approach when willing to ensure the interoperability of PLM solutions within a Dynamic Manufacturing Network (DMN), based on e-Business PLM standards and their implementations, being industrial processes, methods, applications or Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions. Indeed, addressing interoperability challenges in such a complex digital business eco-system calls for a holistic approach based on the “system” paradigm. Setting this way, a part of our goal is to underline the limits and drawbacks of such an approach as interoperability brakes and to derive the issues that must be addressed in terms of research in order to remove them. This paper introduces a new approach in order to set up a test bed environment for PLM standards. The required and proposed approach considers a PLM standard not only as a technical solution, but above all as a strategic solution for which it is mandatory to support and enhance discussions between enterprise, product/system, processes, ICT architects and designers. The proposed approach - for analyzing and assessing the relevancy of PLM standards regarding their usage in specific business contexts - will be illustrated with a multi-layer modeling language. This language is used to model standards-based business collaboration scenarios and to model the test bed environment that will enable the execution/simulation of this scenario and the assessment of related standards implementations regarding the business needs of the scenario. The addressed case study is based on a data exchange scenario between a customer production order scheduler and a supplier production order executer using the ISA 95 standard. From this example, the interoperability issues related to DMN system of systems will be identified, for which accurate test based methods will be defined in future work.