Holon-Oriented B2M Process Modelling Approach for Applications Interoperability in Manufacturing Systems Environment

Enterprise-control system integration between business systems, manufacturing execution systems and shop-floor process-control systems remains a key issue for facilitating the deployment of plant-wide information-control systems. This integration leads to strengthen the paradigm of Business to Manufacturing (B2M) interoperability. However, this needs establishing standards and protocols for data exchange between different enterprise and manufacturing applications. Nevertheless, since there is no methodology for collecting data, exchanged information is generally incomplete. Business process modelling aims at specifying objects flows and processes inside an enterprise levels and among networked enterprises. However, the increased complexity of these models does not help at ensuring coherent relationships between its components. In this paper, we discuss a B2M Process Modelling approach for defining and building B2M process models, based on the concept of Holon. This approach aims at increasing the models abstraction in order to simplify its initial comprehensiveness, after while we draft the integration of a proposed Holon meta-model in existing methods for enterprise applications interoperability. Finally, an example is presented using the implementation of the meta-model in an enterprise modelling tool.