Data-driven design of engineering processes with COREPROModeler

Enterprises increasingly demand IT support for the coordination of their engineering processes, which often consist of hundreds up to thousands of sub-processes. From a technical viewpoint, these sub-processes have to be concurrently executed and synchronized considering numerous interdependencies. So far this coordination has mainly been accomplished manually, which has resulted in errors and inconsistencies. In order to deal with this problem, we have to better understand the interdependencies between the subprocesses to be coordinated. In particular we can benefit from the fact that sub-processes are often correlated to the assembly of a product (represented by a product data structure). This information can be utilized for the modeling and execution of so-called data-driven process structures. In this paper we present the COREPRO demonstrator that supports the data-driven modeling of these process structures. The approach explicitly establishes a close linkage between product data structures and engineering processes.