Call for papers: Interaction between Software Engineering Methods/Tools and Manufacturing Production Systems/Processes

A special issue of International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management

Management of product life cycles may be viewed as an achievement of industrialisation for a systematic approach to production systems. It provides at every level of enterprises a scientific methodology for work. The operational level work first focused on various CAD systems. Coordination was then addressed by (1) providing tools to share information about product and, (2) tools to assist project management. PLM should master a holistic view of manufacturing and production systems. PLM is applied to the extended enterprise which is a complex set of relationships between companies, services and human actors. The corresponding interactions are either contractual based or based on trust between actors. If some processes are modelled and orchestrated via process management systems, many interactions remain informal.

Software engineering followed a parallel and quite disconnected evolution. After the initial step where computation was a direct interaction with hardware, several abstraction levels were created to ease the control of software leading to increased complexity of such systems. From the functional decomposition of software through object oriented techniques, software engineering evolved towards new methods such as service oriented approaches and model driven engineering. Service oriented approaches organise the development of complex and large-scale software applications by definition of contractual and loosely coupled interfaces. Model driven engineering uses a strategy where software development is led by series of modelling steps; a step is viewed as a model transformation. An underlying process is then constructed.

Both PLM of manufactured product and software engineering develop strategies to organise the complexity of a production system. In one case, the final product is executable software while in the second case physical parts and systems must be produced and are the output of the last model transformation. Obviously a parallel may be defined between these two processes but in order to apply methods and tools from one domain into the other one, many important issues must be addressed. In this perspective, software engineering seems to be more formalised and structured than classical production systems. Therefore, many strategies try to model manufactured production systems to well-defined processes which must be led by an adequate information system. However, even if information systems are increasingly widely used to support product development and production management systems, it is time to study

• the granularity of information systems required to manage complex manufacturing and production systems ,
• the cutting-edge where computer science does not improve the efficiency of the manufacturing systems and
• how the practice of manufacturing systems might influence the evolution of computer science technology.

This special issue welcomes both innovative and practical contributions addressing:

• How can granularity of information systems dedicated to manufactured product development and production be improved?
• How to determine when computer science is no more an efficient support to manufacturing practices?
• How can the practice of development and production in production processes influence evolution of computer science technology?

The proposed (or related topics), quantitative or qualitative methods and tools, surveys, reviews, or case studies are the focus of this issue. Technological models and computational architectures that have been developed for PLM are welcome, as well as new developments both in theory and in application are also appropriate.

By addressing both theoreticaland application problems, this special issue hopes to point out research challenges and future research directions. The main intent is to make practitioners aware of similarities between software engineering and other engineering domains specifically production and produce development systems and to promote a better understanding and collaboration between the two fields.

This issue addresses PLM from several viewpoints, such as, but not limited to, the following:

• Applications of SOA for PLM
• Applications of MDE for PLM,
• Ontologies, interoperability and its relevance to PLM
• Non-formal methods and practice that requires assistance
• Methods and tools to create computer support for PLM (KBE, etc).
• Models of relationships between strategic levels and operational levels.
• Models for the extended enterprise as a network of relationships between companies
• Modelling collaborative activities
• Software engineering requirements for the next generation PLM systems

Papers that provide a critical review of past intelligent computational systems developed for PLM applications are also welcome.

Important Dates
Full Paper Due: 15 December, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: 15 February, 2010
Final Version of Paper Due: 15 Apri, 2010