Collaborative modeling of manufacturing processes – A wiki – Based approach

Manufacturing companies face substantial challenges due to a new industrial (r)evolution taking place. The increasing digitalization and intelligentization of manufacturing processes will lead to a higher degree of automation and as well autonomy of production systems. Driven by these developments, model-driven approaches gain increasing attention in the domain of manufacturing. Future manufacturing processes will need to be increasingly adaptive to highly individualized customer needs. Therefore, reengineering of such processes must be supported by a platform that facilitates their quick adaption to changing conditions in an unbureaucratic way. In this paper we describe the design of a collaborative process modeling environment that is based on the principles of wiki-engines and enables quick, easy, concurrent and transparent design of manufacturing processes. Finally, we provide lessons learned from a first large-scale evaluation case-study.