Process-Oriented Design Paradigm for Automatic Code Generation in Manufacturing

Industry 4.0 brings new features to the manufacturing industry, including informatization, intelligence, and higher integration. Complex interrelationships among components within the industrial Cyber-Physical System (iCPS) further increase the automation system design and development difficulty. Therefore, integrated design models for contemporary industrial systems should ensure flexibility and interoperability to accommodate highly integrated systems and rapidly changing requirements. This paper proposes a generic process modeling method based on Process-Oriented Models (POM) for automatic code generation. Process-Oriented Models can be regarded as a semantic set of operations encapsulating the process and corresponding attributes in the manufacturing process. Each operation is executable. The execution results can be used for model optimization to achieve the optimization process. These models with parameters can be further converted into modular code automatically according to pre-defined mapping rules. A process manufacturing case study proves the proposed method can achieve complete and correct process modeling of automation systems. Industrial software development based on Process-Oriented Models can significantly increase the efficiency and accuracy of software development of industrial Cyber-Physical Systems.