Abstract—A key element of virtual product development is
the modeling of production flows in form of process chains,
which consist of processes that are executed either concurrently
or consecutively. In practice, process chains can become very
complex due to a high number of different processes and, thus,
it is difficult for users to maintain an overview of the entire
chain. This motivates the necessity to develop models that
capture the properties of the individual processes as well as the
dependencies between the processes of a process chain on a high
level of abstraction. Such models also serve as the basis for
various optimization problems, e.g., with respect to the energy
usage of the entire process chain. This article proposes a model
for the representation of production process chains and
additionally shows how to check the consistency of a given
process chain model. The modeling is based on a directed
acyclic graph with a hierarchical structure. The properties of
the processes and the workpieces produced are captured by
annotations of the nodes and edges of the graph. The
consistency check is based on rules that verify the global
structure of the entire process chain, the coupling of processes,
and the compatibility of process variants.
Index Terms—Modeling, process chain, production process,
verification.
J. Dümmler, S. Gehre, and G. Rünger are with Technische Universität
Chemnitz, Department of Computer Science, 09107 Chemnitz, Germany
(e-mail: {djo, svge, ruenger}@cs.tu-chemnitz.de).
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Cite:Jörg Dümmler, Sven Gehre, and Gudula Rünger, "Modeling and Verification of Production Process Chains," International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 346-352, 2014.
