Foundations for Product Realization Process (PRP) Knowledge Sharing

Recent years have seen a great increase in the use of a variety of computer applications for modeling enterprise processes, notably, in the areas of simulations, planning, scheduling, and workflow. Currently, however, there are no robust mechanisms to support the exchange of the information in those models. Lately this problem has been addressed by a number of research efforts. The focus of these efforts has been the development of common process knowledge interchange language that would permit the process information stored in a model in one application to be transferred to another application. The focus of the proposed effort is to build upon existing research to develop a rigorous foundation for an integrated environment for the exchange of process information that is currently stored and maintained in different enterprise modeling applications. The proposed approach is, first, to refine and extend the current Process Interchange Format to include explicit ontologies of relevant general domains (the electro-mechanical product domain, in particular), as well as particular modeling applications (simulation, etc.); second, to define integration theories that explicate the logical connections between these ontologies; and finally, on the basis of this framework, to define an architecture that supports robust process knowledge exchange.