Multi-Level Modeling Framework for Machine as a Service Applications Based on Product Process Resource Models

At present, manufacturing processes are highly tailored to a specific product. Changes in product requirements therefore lead to big manual efforts for adapting the manufacturing process and reconfiguring production resources accordingly. Existing approaches do not cope well with this complexity. This hinders agile, customer-oriented manufacturing. A promising approach for automated assembling processes is the Machine as a Service paradigm, which aims for providing production resources on demand. This requires a consistent and pervasive formalization of product specifications, the corresponding manufacturing resources and their interdependencies. Thus, our first contribution is a generic and extensible multi-level and modular modeling framework to formalize products and available resources. Our framework is scalable for large companies and enables reuse for cross-company collaboration and supplier integration. Thereby, the static relationship between product, process and resource is avoided by describing product features and resource skills in separate models. Our framework uses the standardized SysML/UML. Our second contribution is the ability of our framework to integrate different standards. For demonstration, we apply our multi-level approach to a flexible assembly of terminal boxes for transmission gears and show the integration of standards by embedding the eCl@ss classification.