Enriching standards-based digital thread by fusing as-designed and as-inspected data using knowledge graphs

Realizing the digital thread is essential for linking and orchestrating data across the product lifecycle in smart manufacturing. Linking heterogeneous lifecycle data is critical to maintain associativity and traceability in a digital thread. Recently, researchers have successfully leveraged ontology models with knowledge graphs in engineering domains for threading different lifecycle data. One of the most successful of such efforts is OntoSTEP which enables the formal capture of information embedded in the STandard for Exchange of Product model data (STEP) data representation, or ISO 10303. Meanwhile, an emerging inspection standard, called the Quality Information Framework (QIF), has garnered significant attention as it can bring quality information into the digital thread. Implementing more automated methods for product quality assurance is challenging due to the lack of unified information models from design to inspection. To this end, we propose an approach to fuse as-designed data represented in STEP and as-inspected data represented in QIF in a standards-based digital thread based on ontology with knowledge graphs. Specifically, we present an automated pipeline for generating knowledge graphs representing STEP and QIF data, a mapping implementation to integrate STEP and QIF knowledge graphs, and rules and queries to demonstrate the integration’s potential for better decision making with respect to product quality assurance.     

产品全生命周期数据信息的域建模方法

针对传统的产品数据模型及其建模方法在描述和管理产品全生命周期数据信息上的不足,提出一种基于域的产品全生命周期数据建模方法.首先介绍了域建模方法的本质及产品全生命周期数据的内涵,并按照统一的划分标准构建了多个可扩展的域;然后以现代复杂产品开发的一般周期为例,建立了基于域的产品全生命周期数据模型;最后研究了基于域的模型映射方法及规则,详细描述了产品数据信息在整个生命周期内的动态演化和基于域的产品双向追溯过程.通过在产品全生命周期管理系统中的应用,证明了该方法的有效性.     

P2P Data synchronization for product lifecycle management

Intelligent products are an undeniable asset for efficient product lifecycle management (PLM), providing ways to capture events related to physical objects at various locations and times. Today and more than ever before, PLM tools and systems must be built upon standards for enhancing interoperability among all product stakeholders and developing tools independent of specific vendors, applications, and operating systems. Based on this observation, this paper develops strategies to improve “information sustainability” in PLM environments using standardized communication interfaces defined by a recent standard proposal named quantum lifecycle management (QLM) messaging standards. More concretely, data synchronization models based upon QLM standards are developed to enable the synchronization of product-related information among various systems, networks, and organizations involved throughout the product lifecycle. Our proposals are implemented and assessed based on two distinct platforms defined in the healthcare and home automation sectors.     

Traceability and management of dispersed product knowledge during design and manufacturing

Product development processes comprise highly creative and knowledge-intensive tasks that involve extensive information exchange and communication among geographically distributed teams. Due to the geographical and institutional separation between the different systems involved in the product lifecycle, product knowledge sharing is becoming a key issue in the information systems of extended enterprises. This paper addresses the issue and challenges of product knowledge traceability during the product development. The aim of this research effort is to enhance the sharing and use of product knowledge acquired during the development process using traceability information.A standardized approach is proposed to trace and share product knowledge and key constructs to support traceability during the product development process are identified and formalized. This research effort is based on the premise that an important step towards achieving product knowledge sharing is providing traceability across various product knowledge elements that are used in product development phases, i.e. design and manufacturing. Two disjointed but complementary case studies illustrating the benefit of traceability are presented. The potential role of traceability is described, first to support the decision making process during engineering change management (ECM), and second to support product-oriented modelling for knowledge sharing and exchanging to meet the quality requirements. The proposed approach has been implemented using the MEGA Suite tool and applied to each of the case studies and could be integrated to PLM systems currently in use.     

Decision support for the software product line domain engineering lifecycle

Software product line engineering is a paradigm that advocates the reusability of software engineering assets and the rapid development of new applications for a target domain. These objectives are achieved by capturing the commonalities and variabilities between the applications of the target domain and through the development of comprehensive and variability-covering feature models. The feature models developed within the software product line development process need to cover the relevant features and aspects of the target domain. In other words, the feature models should be elaborate representations of the feature space of that domain. Given that feature models, i.e., software product line feature models, are developed mostly by domain analysts by sifting through domain documentation, corporate records and transcribed interviews, the process is a cumbersome and error-prone one. In this paper, we propose a decision support platform that assists domain analysts throughout the domain engineering lifecycle by: (1) automatically performing natural language processing tasks over domain documents and identifying important information for the domain analysts such as the features and integrity constraints that exist in the domain documents; (2) providing a collaboration platform around the domain documents such that multiple domain analysts can collaborate with each other during the process using a Wiki; (3) formulating semantic links between domain terminology with external widely used ontologies such as WordNet in order to disambiguate the terms used in domain documents; and (4) developing traceability links between the unstructured information available in the domain documents and their formal counterparts within the formal feature model representations. Results obtained from our controlled experimentations show that the decision support platform is effective in increasing the performance of the domain analysts during the domain engineering lifecycle in terms of both the coverage and accuracy measures.     

An architecture to integrate IEC 61131-3 systems in an IEC 61499 distributed solution

The IEC 61499 standard has been developed to allow the modeling and design of distributed control systems, providing advanced concepts of software engineering (such as abstraction and encapsulation) to the world of control engineering. The introduction of this standard in already existing control environments poses challenges, since programs written using the widespread IEC 61131-3 programming standard cannot be directly executed in a fully IEC 61499 environment without reengineering effort. In order to solve this problem, this paper presents an architecture to integrate modules of the two standards, allowing the exploitation of the benefits of both. The proposed architecture is based on the coexistence of control software of the two standards. Modules written in one standard interact with some particular interfaces that encapsulate functionalities and information to be exchanged with the other standard. In particular, the architecture permits to utilize available run-times without modification, it allows the reuse of software modules, and it utilizes existing features of the standards. A methodology to integrate IEC 61131-3 modules in an IEC 61499 distributed solution based on such architecture is also developed, and it is described via a case study to prove feasibility and benefits. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution does not add substantial load or delays to the system when compared to an IEC 61131-3 based solution. By acting on task period, it can achieve performances similar to an IEC 61499 solution.     

Ontological approach for products-centric information system interoperability in networked manufacturing enterprises

Standardisation initiatives (ISO and IEC) try to answer the problem of managing heterogeneous information, scattered within organizations, by formalising the knowledge related to products technical data. While the product is the centred object from which, along its lifecycle, all enterprise systems, either inside a single enterprise or between cooperating networked enterprises, have a specific view, we may consider it as active as far as it participates to the decisions making by providing knowledge about itself. This paper proposes a novel approach, postulating that the product, represented by its technical data, may be considered as interoperable per se with the many applications involved in manufacturing enterprises as far as it embeds knowledge about itself, as it stores all its technical data, provided that these are embedded on a common model. The matter of this approach is to formalise of all technical data and concepts contributing to the definition of a Product Ontology, embedded into the product itself and making it interoperable with applications, minimising loss of semantics.     

安全及安全相关控制系统

在工业过程控制领域,安全理念被越来越多的人所接受,随之,贯穿安全概念的控制系统,即安全相关控制系统得到了快速发展和广泛应用。IEC61508标准以其“以人为本”的宏观视野和安全生命周期(Safety Life Cycle)方法论的权威性,受到业界的推崇。本文试图围绕着IEC61508标准,阐述安全概念及其量化、综合安全等级(SIL)的确定、安全控制系统的设计思想、当今安全控制系统的技术水平和应用, 以及未来的发展趋势。     

A spatiotemporal information management framework for product design and assembly process planning reconciliation

This paper introduces an innovative framework for product design and assembly process planning reconciliation. Nowadays, both product lifecycle phases are quasi concurrently performed in industry and this configuration has led to competitive gains in efficiency and flexibility by improving designers’ awareness and product quality. Despite these efforts, some limitations/barriers are still encountered regarding the lack of dynamical representation, information consistency and information flow continuity. It is due to the inherent nature of the information created and managed in both phases and the lack of interoperability between the related information systems. Product design and assembly process planning phases actually generate heterogeneous information, since the first one describes all information related to “what to be delivered” and the latter rationalises all information with regards to “how to be assembled”. In other words, the integration of assembly planning issue in product design requires reconciliation means with appropriate relationships of the architectural product definition in space with its assembly sequence in terms of time. Therefore, the main objective is to provide a spatiotemporal information management framework based on a strong semantic and logical foundation in product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, increasing therefore actors’ awareness, flexibility and efficiency with a better abstraction of the physical reality and appropriate information management procedures. A case study is presented to illustrate the relevance of the proposed framework and its hub-based implementation within PLM systems.     

Rigorous identification and encoding of trace-links in model-driven engineering

Model-driven engineering (MDE) involves the construction and manipulation of many models of different kinds in an engineering process. In principle, models can be used in the product engineering lifecycle in an end-to-end manner for representing requirements, designs and implementations, and assisting in deployment and maintenance. The manipulations applied to models may be manual, but they can also be automated??for example, using model transformations, code generation, and validation. To enhance automated analysis, consistency and coherence of models used in an MDE process, it is useful to identify, establish and maintain trace-links between models. However, the breadth and scope of trace-links that can be used in MDE is substantial, and managing trace-link information can be very complex. In this paper, we contribute to managing the complexity of traceability information in MDE in two ways: firstly, we demonstrate how to identify the different kinds of trace-links that may appear in an end-to-end MDE process; secondly, we describe a rigorous approach to defining semantically rich trace-links between models, where the models themselves may be constructed using diverse modelling languages. The definition of rich trace-links allows us to use tools to maintain and analyse traceability relationships.     

ONTO-PDM: Product-driven ONTOlogy for Product Data Management interoperability within manufacturing process environment

This paper proposes an approach for facilitating systems interoperability in a manufacturing environment. It is based on the postulate that an ontological model of a product may be considered as a facilitator for interoperating all application software that share information during the physical product lifecycle. The number of applications involved in manufacturing enterprises may in fact refer to the knowledge that must be embedded in it, appropriately storing all its technical data based on a common model. Standardisation initiatives (ISO and IEC) try to answer the problem of managing heterogeneous information scattered within organizations, by formalising the knowledge related to product technical data. The matter of this approach is to formalise all those technical data and concepts contributing to the definition of a Product Ontology, embedded into the product itself and making it interoperable with applications, thus minimising loss of semantics.     

Toward standardized exchange of plant 3D CAD models using ISO 15926

Plant three-dimensional (3D) computer-aided design (CAD) models typically consist of logical configuration, equipment specifications and ports, and 3D shapes. Because 3D CAD models are used as master information throughout a plant’s entire lifecycle and many stakeholders are involved in such lifecycle, providing a method for sharing plant 3D CAD models among various stakeholders is very important. Standard 15926 from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO 15926) is a family of standards that is intended to support the sharing and integrating of all information during the life of a process plant. Therefore it is important for ISO 15926 to support plant 3D CAD models. In order to address this issue, this study investigates a standardized method to exchange plant 3D CAD models using ISO 15926. Information requirements regarding plant 3D CAD models are established, and then ISO 15926 reference data (classes, attributes, and templates) are extended to cover information requirements. For demonstration of the proposed method, we developed a prototype platform where plant 3D CAD models in ISO 15926 are loaded and retrieved.     

源于业务的CIM模型实现通用方法框架

在电力行业,IEC61970/61968 CIM因为可以解决信息孤岛问题而成为当前电力企业进行信息交互的标准并被广泛使用。众所周知IEC CIM模型是一个比较庞大的体系,在应用中都是采取相应范围的裁剪和按照需求进行相应的扩充,我们称之为定制化。由于各个人或厂商对于CIM模型的理解不一致,在裁剪或扩充的时候难免出现诸如实用性、与前版本的一致性和可扩充性等的差异问题。特别是在实践中发现在支持接入不同时期、由不同厂商开发的正在运行的应用系统基于CIM标准的实例化有各自的方式和方法,所以电力企业将面临着不同应用系统采用不同CIM标准版本进行的实例化情况,非常难以管理。为了解决同一个CIM模型标准落地存在差异的问题,介绍一种通过实践融合了业务建模方法（BPMN 2.0）、智能电网系统的需求开发方法论（IEC62559）和IEC通用方法框架CMF的方法框架,从方法论的角度约束或指导CIM模型落地。     

Probabilistic size proxy for software effort prediction: A framework

Software effort prediction is an important and challenging activity that takes place during the early stages of software development, where costing is needed. Software size estimate is one of the most popular inputs for software effort prediction models. Accordingly, providing a size estimate with good accuracy early in the lifecycle is very important; it is equally challenging too. Estimates that are computed early in the development lifecycle, when it is needed the most, are typically associated with uncertainty. However, none of the prominent software effort prediction techniques or software size metrics addresses this issue satisfactorily. In this paper, we propose a framework for developing probabilistic size proxies for software effort prediction using information from conceptual UML models created early in the software development lifecycle. The framework accounts for uncertainty in software size and effort prediction by providing the estimate as a probability density function instead of a certain value. We conducted a case study using open source datasets and the results were encouraging.     

Industrial blockchain based framework for product lifecycle management in industry 4.0

Product lifecycle management (PLM) aims to seamlessly manage all products and information and knowledge generated throughout the product lifecycle for achieving business competitiveness. Conventionally, PLM is implemented based on standalone and centralized systems provided by software vendors. The information of PLM is hardly to be integrated and shared among the cooperating parties. It is difficult to meet the requirements of the openness, interoperability and decentralization of the Industry 4.0 era. To address these challenges, this paper proposed an industrial blockchain-based PLM framework to facilitate the data exchange and service sharing in the product lifecycle. Firstly, we proposed the concept of industrial blockchain as the use of blockchain technology in the industry with the integration of IoT, M2M, and efficient consensus algorithms. It provided an open but secured information storage and exchange platform for the multiple stakeholders to achieve the openness, interoperability and decentralization in era of industry 4.0. Secondly, we proposed and developed customized blockchain information service to fulfill the connection between a single node with the blockchain network. As a middleware, it can not only process the multi-source and heterogeneous data from varied stages in the product lifecycle, but also broadcast the processed data to the blockchain network. Moreover, smart contract is used to automate the alert services in the product lifecycles. Finally, we illustrated the blockchain-based application between the cooperating partners in four emerging product lifecycle stages, including co-design and co-creation, quick and accurate tracking and tracing, proactive maintenance, and regulated recycling. A simulation experiment demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework. The results showed that the proposed framework is scalable and efficient, and hence it is feasible to be adopted in industry. With the successful development of the proposed platform, it is promising to provide an effective PLM for improving interoperability and cooperation between stakeholders in the entire product lifecycle.     

基于双层架构的溯源许可链共识机制

区块链中的区块按照时间历史顺序进行排列,同时通过数据加密技术以及共识机制使区块链具有不可篡改性,这使产品溯源成为区块链的重要应用场景。选择产品信息追溯技术要考虑技术的可行性同时要考虑产品以及生产者的市场属性,这使许可链代替公有链成为产品信息溯源的重要部署方式。现有研究成果中对溯源许可链的研究多停留在机制设计和框架建构上,少有对适用于产品信息溯源的共识算法进行研究。在技术工程实践过程中,联盟链中多选用实用拜占庭容错（PBFT,practical byzantine fault tolerance）作为溯源链的共识机制（如超级账本项目 Hyperledger）,但随着参与节点数量的增加,溯源链的运行效率明显下降,延迟时间明显提高,致使多数项目依然处于实验阶段。基于此,提出基于双层架构的溯源许可链共识机制（DLPCM）。首先将参与者在垂直维度上化分为两层,其次在不同层次上根据区块链的不同部署方式采用不同的共识机制,最后对该共识机制下的溯源信息查询机制进行介绍,为基于许可链的溯源系统的开发和设计提供了重要借鉴。     

Enterprise Modeling and Decision-Support for Automating the Business Rules Lifecycle

Business rules represent policies, procedures and constraints regarding how an enterprise conducts its business. To get the full benefits of modeling business rules requires an approach to managing them through their full lifecycle, from acquisition through deployment and evolution. The research reported in this paper is aimed at determining what infrastructure capabilities are needed to provide this lifecycle support. The solution embodies a modeling framework that captures the structure of the enterprise, in terms of which the business rules can be expressed, and decision-support capabilities for reasoning about and deriving business rules. The paper demonstrates the possibility of automatic support of the business rules lifecycle by automatically generating business rules from the captured information, along with data representing domain assumptions in a case study (the London Ambulance System). A system was implemented to illustrate the methodology and to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. The methodology also gives guidance on how to deal with pragmatically important situations such as rules that involve both automated and human tasks, nondeterministic rules, and goal-oriented versus operational rules.     

A SysML-based approach to traceability management and design slicing in support of safety certification: Framework,tool support,and case studies

ContextTraceability is one of the basic tenets of all safety standards and a key prerequisite for software safety certification. In the current state of practice, there is often a significant traceability gap between safety requirements and software design. Poor traceability, in addition to being a non-compliance issue on its own, makes it difficult to determine whether the design fulfills the safety requirements, mainly because the design aspects related to safety cannot be clearly identified.ObjectiveThe goal of this article is to develop a framework for specifying and automatically extracting design aspects relevant to safety requirements. This goal is realized through the combination of two components: (1) A methodology for establishing traceability between safety requirements and design, and (2) an algorithm that can extract for any given safety requirement a minimized fragment (slice) of the design that is sound, and yet easy to understand and inspect.MethodWe ground our framework on System Modeling Language (SysML). The framework includes a traceability information model, a methodology to establish traceability, and mechanisms for model slicing based on the recorded traceability information. The framework is implemented in a tool, named SafeSlice.ResultsWe prove that our slicing algorithm is sound for temporal safety properties, and argue about the completeness of slices based on our practical experience. We report on the lessons learned from applying our approach to two case studies, one benchmark and one industrial case. Both studies indicate that our approach substantially reduces the amount of information that needs to be inspected for ensuring that a given (behavioral) safety requirement is met by the design.     

Product relationships management enabler for concurrent engineering and product lifecycle management

The current competitive industrial context requires more flexible, intelligent and compact product lifecycles, especially in the product development process where several lifecycle issues have to be considered, so as to deliver lifecycle oriented products. This paper describes the application of a novel product relationships management approach, in the context of product lifecycle management (PLM), enabling concurrent product design and assembly sequence planning. Previous work has provided a foundation through a theoretical framework, enhanced by the paradigm of product relational design and management. This statement therefore highlights the concurrent and proactive aspect of assembly oriented design vision. Central to this approach is the establishment and implementation of a complex and multiple viewpoints of product development addressing various stakeholders design and assembly planning points of view. By establishing such comprehensive relationships and identifying related relationships among several lifecycle phases, it is then possible to undertake the product design and assembly phases concurrently. Specifically, the proposed work and its application enable the management of product relationship information at the interface of product-process data management techniques. Based on the theory, models and techniques such as described in previous work, the implementation of a new hub application called PEGASUS is then described. Also based on web service technology, PEGASUS can be considered as a mediator application and/or an enabler for PLM that externalises product relationships and enables the control of information flow with internal regulation procedures. The feasibility of the approach is justified and the associated benefits are reported with a mechanical assembly as a case study.