Measuring Similarity for Manufacturing Process Models

Part 4: Manufacturing Performance Management in Smart FactoriesInternational audienceIn manufacturing companies, it is vital to manage their manufacturing processes in order to ensure high quality of products and manufacturing consistency. Because so-called smart factories interconnect machines and acquire processing data, the business process management (BPM) approach can enrich the capability of manufacturing operation management. In this paper, we propose BPM-based similarity measures for manufacturing processes and apply them to the processes of a real factory. In addition to the structural similarity of the existing studies, we suggest a production-related operation similarity. Our contribution is considered on the assumption that a manufacturing company adopts the BPM approach and it operates a variety of manufacturing process models. The similarity measures enable the company to automatically search and reutilize models or parts of models within a repository of manufacturing process models