Thomas Vosgien

Digital factory system for dynamic manufacturing network supporting networked collaborative product development

During the last years, important research investments have been made by Airbus Group Innovations for the establishment of sustainable Product and Process data interoperability based on open standards. Driven successively by concurrent engineering, collaborative product design in the virtual enterprise or digital behavorial aircraft, it was capitalize through the establishment of a federative interoperability framework. Driven by factory of the future-related research, the dynamic manufacturing network (DMN) concept enriched the framework, which aims at providing agile infrastructure for networked collaborative product development. For such networks, protocols based on open eBusiness product lifecycle management (PLM) standards for exchange and sharing of product and process data between the implied organizations, their processes and the technical enteprise applications supporting these processes are needed This paper presents a new way of combining model-based enterprise platform engineering, model-driven architecture, and system engineering in order to adress the establishment of a sustainable interoperability within DMN. Based on relevant litterature interoperability issues, this paper describes the new approach, which relies on the association of effective existing technologies coupled with research results on the fields of model-driven engineering (MDE), enterprise interoperability, system engineering and PLM. The new approach relies on the concept of digital factory system (DFS) coupled with DMN in order to produce sustainable and agile collaborative infrastructure for manufacturing digital ebusiness ecosystem. The approach is then illustrated through use case coming from the IMAGINE project and an outline is provided on how it will be used and developed further for the assessment of PLM standards and their implementation in the Standard Interoperability PLM project at IRT-Systemx.

KBE-PLM Integration Schema for Engineering Knowledge Re-use and Design Automation

The re-use of product knowledge is vital to the development of Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) systems and to the deployment of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) strategies. This paper addresses the challenges related to KBE-PLM systems integration in order to unlock engineering knowledge from proprietary representations and to manage the lifecycle of KBE models as well as their usage by different design automation applications. Essential constituents of product knowledge are identified and analyzed and the concepts of design intent and design rationale are re-introduced as key enablers to re-use this product knowledge in the appropriate KBE context. The paper introduces a KBE-PLM integration framework including a platform-independent Open KBE repository structured according to the KBE-PLM integration schema. This schema is a multi-layer neutral product and knowledge data model designed for integrating information from parameterized Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models, rule-based KBE systems and PLM systems.

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

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.

PLM Standards Modelling for Enterprise Interoperability: A Manufacturing Case Study for ERP and MES Systems Integration Based on ISA-95

Today Enterprise Interoperability is considered as a key factor of successful collaboration. It was identified as a critical need that has to be taken into account all along the lifecycle of a manufactured product. To deal with this problem and to reduce complexity of the different systems of interest used when different companies have to collaborate together, Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Enterprise Modelling (EM) are considered as solutions to facilitate Enterprise Interoperability. Dealing with interoperability issues in the context of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), we have to mention the importance of product data and process standards implementation as interoperability enablers. In order to address the complexity of PLM standards, we propose to apply a model-driven methodology for modelling these standards and the related collaboration scenarios. This approach intends to make standards more comprehensive and to better manage standards evolutions, but also to instantiate and re-use these “generic” standards models to specify specific business collaboration scenarios. This proposal aims also to facilitate the exchange, testing and simulation of standards implementations. In this paper, the focus is on the ISA 95 standard for manufacturing-PLM integration, with an exchange scenario between Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES) based on ISA 95 standard.

A Federated Enterprise Architecture and MBSE Modeling Framework for Integrating Design Automation into a Global PLM Approach

PLM and Design Automation (DA) are two interdependent and necessary approaches to increase the performance and efficiency of product development processes. Often, DA systems’ usability suffers due to a lack of integration in industrial business environments stemming from the independent consideration of PLM and DA. This article proposes a methodological and modeling framework for developing and deploying DA solutions within a global PLM approach. This framework supports the identification of DA potentials and the definition of the DA task building blocks to support DA task formalization by practitioners. The aim is to make the specification and development of DA solutions more efficient and aligned with the business requirements and with the existing digital environments. This framework combines the usage of two standardized modeling languages to make the captured knowledge re-usable across heterogeneous PLM and DA applications. An industrial case study demonstrating the applicability of the framework is introduced and discussed.

Model Based Enterprise Modeling for Testing PLM Interoperability in Dynamic Manufacturing Network

When willing to prepare and to build operational Product Life cycle Management interoperability within a Dynamic Manufacturing Network (DMN) in a mature digital business ecosystem such as Aeronautic, Space and Defense, the approaches proposed by the Enterprise Application Interoperability are insufficient when willing to address the existing interoperability brakes Some of these brakes have been addressed in project such as IMAGINE and SIP@SystemX, allowing to experiment innovative way of using standards based enterprise modeling and also to identify some additional gaps for applying model base enterprise modeling to PLM interoperability within a DMN. After defining the business and the scientific contexts, the paper describes this new approach which consists in federating the usage of several PLM, Business, Information and ICT standard through the usage of an enterprise modeling standardized language, ArchiMate, and associated modeling tool Archi created using ArchiMate as an EMF DSL. The defined methodology is based on producing a set of DMN blueprints and associated templates. Then, through model to model transformation, other more detailed models using more specialized languages are created and used for software component generation and deployment enterprise hub platform based on standards. Using the methodology, the associated framework and the developed resulting from our research activity, we are now able to prepare and build interoperability within a DMN. Ability of preserving investment performed with the legacy and reducing risks associated to future evolution was demonstrated through IMAGINE Aeronautic Lab experimentation within SIP. Such experimentation also highlighted some issues related to model based engineering in such a context, and allowed identifying needs for new extensions of the federative PLM interoperability framework for Collaborative Networked Product Development initiated during the ATHENA project. It will be addressed in future work.

Engineering Knowledge Extraction for Semantic Interoperability Between CAD, KBE and PLM Systems

For the deployment of both Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) approaches, product and process engineering knowledge needs to be identified, acquired, formalized, processed and reused. While knowledge acquisition is still a bottleneck process, the formalized engineering knowledge is still too often encapsulated in CAD models and in KBE systems developed in vendor-specific environments. To address this issue, this paper introduces a possible solution enabling the enrichment of a CAD-KBE-PLM integration schema that provides a standardized and neutral representation of engineering knowledge for further reuse across heterogeneous CAD, KBE and PLM systems. To enrich this schema, the proposed solution combines the use of a Multi-CAD API library – which allows platform-independent and automatic extraction of engineering knowledge from CAD models into an XML-based representation – and a Knowledge Acquisition and Formalization Assistant (KAFA) which assist domain experts to formalize their procedural knowledge.

Search a Retrieval in CAD Databases - A User-centric State-of-the-Art Overview.

This article presents a state-of-the-art overview on shape, information and design retrieval systems in the context of CAD engineering. In contrast to existing surveys, we classify the different approaches from a CAD application user point of view. As a consequence, we focus on features of surveyed techniques such as: supported shape data types, handling of geometric invariances, support of metadata, supported query types, quality of retrieval results, and the availability of implementations.