Ontology of the Process Specification Language

Abstract

Representing activities and the constraints on their occurrences is an integral aspect of commonsense reasoning, particularly in manufacturing, enterprise modelling, and autonomous agents or robots. In addition to the traditional concerns of knowledge representation and reasoning, the need to integrate software applications in these areas has become increasingly important. However, interoperability is hindered because the applications use different terminology and representations of the domain. These problems arise most acutely for systems that must manage the heterogeneity inherent in various domains and integrate models of different domains into coherent frameworks. For example, such integration occurs in business process reengineering, where enterprise models integrate processes, organizations, goals and customers. Even when applications use the same terminology, they often associate different semantics with the terms. This clash over the meaning of the terms prevents the seamless exchange of information among the applications. Typically, point-to-point translation programs are written to enable communication from one specific application to another. However, as the number of applications has increased and the information has become more complex, it has been more difficult for software developers to provide translators between every pair of applications that must cooperate. What is needed is some way of explicitly specifying the terminology of the applications in an unambiguous fashion. The Process Specification Language (PSL) ([13], [8]) has been designed to facilitate correct and complete exchange of process information among manufacturing systems 1. Included in these applications are scheduling, process modeling, process planning, production planning, simulation, project management , workflow, and business process reengineering. This chapter will give an 1 PSL has been accepted as project ISO 18629 within the International Organisation of Standardisation, and as of October 2002, part of the work is under review as a Draft International Standard.