Integration of a formal specification approach into CPPS engineering workflow for machinery validation

Abstract

Cyber Physical Production Systems (CPPS) operate for a long time and face continuous and incremental changes to follow up varying requirements. Interdisciplinary engineering of CPPS is often subject to delay and cost overrun; and quality control may even fail due to the lack of efficient information exchange between multiple involved actors. We propose to integrate a formal requirement specification approach, namely Generalized Test Tables including tool support, into industrial workflows and present the approach through extended notations of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), namely BPMN++*, with the tool-coupling aspect. The suggested tooling enables automation engineers to follow the defined workflow systematically and communicate easier through the formally represented change requirement. The approach is demonstrated by two typical use cases of changing a CPPS’ control software and showing the result by means of an extended BPMN++ model exemplarily.