The Process Specification Language (PSL) is a set of
logic terms used to describe
processes
A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic.
Things called a process include:
Business and management
*Business process, activities that produce a specific se ...
. The logic terms are
specified in an
ontology that provides a
formal description of the components and their relationships that make up a process. The ontology was developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (
NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...
), and has been approved as an international standard in the document
ISO 18629.
The Process Specification Language can be used for the representation of
manufacturing,
engineering and
business processes, including production scheduling, process planning,
workflow management
A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of ...
,
business process reengineering
Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundam ...
, simulation, process realization, process modelling, and
project management. In the manufacturing domain, PSL's objective is to serve as a common representation for integrating several process-related applications throughout the manufacturing process
life cycle.
Ontology
The foundation of the ontology of PSL is a set of primitive
concepts (''object, activity, activity_occurrence, timepoint''), constants (''inf+, inf-''), functions (''beginof, endof''), and
relations
Relation or relations may refer to:
General uses
*International relations, the study of interconnection of politics, economics, and law on a global level
*Interpersonal relationship, association or acquaintance between two or more people
*Public ...
(''occurrence_of, participates_in, between, before, exists_at, is_occurring_at''). This core ontology is then used to describe more complex concepts. The ontology uses the
Common Logic Interchange Format (CLIF) to represent the concepts, constants, functions, and relations.
This ontology provides a vocabulary of classes and relations for concepts at the ground level of event-instances, object-instances, and timepoints. PSL's top level is built around the following:
* Activity, a class or type of action, such as install-part, which is the class of actions in which parts are installed
* Activity-occurrence, an event or action that takes place at a specific place and time, such as a specific instance of install-part occurring at a specific
timestamp
* Timepoint, a point in time
* Object, anything that is not a timepoint or an activity.
See also
*
ISO TC 184/SC 4, standards for industrial data
*
Process ontology, ontologies for processes
References
Ontology (information science)
ISO 18629
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