Adapting HPM to B2M interoperability issues: Towards Interoperability between Business Management Level and Shop Floor Level

Enterprise-control system integration between business systems, workflow systems, manufacturing execution systems and shop-floor processcontrol systems remains a key issue for facilitating the deployment of plantwide information-control systems. Since years, increasing flexibility and efficiency of their systems has been the new challenge for modern manufacturing enterprises. Business process modelling aims at specifying objects flows and processes inside enterprise levels and among networked enterprises. However, the increased complexity of these models does not help at ensuring coherent relationships between its components. Moreover, when modelling different flows could handle different views of the same objects, thus coherence have to be maintained during the whole manufacturing process. In this paper, we show how Holonic Process Models (HPM) could be adapted for Business to Manufacturing (B2M) interoperability by applying the concept of Holon. We define a Holon oriented approach and design principles for specifying and building HPMs, in the specific domain of manufacturing systems. This approach aims at increasing model abstraction in order to simplify its initial comprehensiveness and ensure coherence between different views of manipulated objects. For reusability’s sake, we propose a possible interconnection of the proposed Holon model in existing enterprise models. This integration enables exchanging data between the holon based models and other existing models.