ManLang: A Requirements Modeling Language for the Production

Planning in Manufacturing

Mert Ozkaya

and Gulsah Gokhan Gokcek

Yeditepe University, Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul, Turkey

Eryaz Software, Istanbul, Turkey

Keywords:

Production Planning, Model-based Engineering, Modeling Language, Multiple-viewpoints Modeling.

Abstract:

In manufacturing industries, production planning involves making early decisions about the design and pro-

duction of a product that focuses on different concerns such as the investment to be made, the product (and

its parts) to be manufactured, production line, workstations, and production processes. The decisions and

requirements about those concerns tend to be speciﬁed using ofﬁce tools in many manufacturing companies

(e.g., MS Excel). However, ofﬁce tools lead to some issues including (i)the lack of support for separation

of concerns, graphical editing, precise notation set, and error detection, and (ii)inconsistent and incomplete

requirements speciﬁcations. In this paper, we propose a modeling language called ManLang for specifying the

production planning requirements graphically using multiple viewpoints (i.e., investment, product, line, work-

station, and process). With ManLang, the different viewpoint models may be speciﬁed separately in a way

that the viewpoint models can also be traced via the deﬁned relationships between the viewpoints. We support

ManLang with a graphical modeling editor, which enables for the multiple-viewpoints modeling and the auto-

mated model validation against such properties as model completeness and correctness. We further evaluated

the usability of ManLang and its editor via a survey conducted among the practitioners from manufacturing

industries.

1 INTRODUCTION

Manufacturing industries aim to produce the high

quality products in the least amount of time possi-

ble. With the advent of industry 4.0, digitalising the

manufacturing engineering (Freddi, 2018; Kroll et al.,

2018; Chryssolouris et al., 2009) has gained ever-

increasing importance to maximise the business pro-

ductivity, and therefore, the recent technologies and

innovations on the systems and software engineering

play key roles in making manufacturing more produc-

tive and effective. Indeed, many computer-aided soft-

ware tools have been developed (e.g., the tools for the

process simulations and computer aided manufactur-

ing (CAM), robotic and automation simulation soft-

ware, etc.), which support the product manufactur-

ing from different perspectives including the design of

production systems and processes, robot behaviours,

their simulations and implementation.

In this paper, we focus on the production plan-

ning of manufacturing engineering, which is one of

the most important aspects of manufacturing and need

to be handled carefully to achieve the optimal in-

vestment for a product while maximising the product

quality and reducing the cost and effort needed. To

this end, we analysed the manufacturing domain to-

gether with the domain experts who work for some

of the biggest car and truck manufacturers in Eu-

rope (e.g., TOFAS, Ford Otosan, and Volvo), which

are the partners of the AITOC ITEA project

that

our research here is motivated from. As we ob-

served via series of interviews, to specify the require-

ments for production planning, practitioners need to

consider different concerns at different level of de-

tails where many different but related data need to be

recorded and manipulated and diverse decisions need

to be made using those data for optimal production

planning. The concerns about production planning

may include the variants about the investment to be

made (e.g., capacity, annual production, robotic/man-

ual time, etc.), the parts and other details of the prod-

uct to be manufactured, the production line conﬁgu-

rations, the workstation conﬁgurations for each line,

the production processes to be performed in each sta-

tion and their conﬁguration, and the resources that

AITOC: https://itea4.org/project/aitoc.html

Ozkaya, M. and Gokcek, G.

ManLang: A Requirements Modeling Language for the Production Planning in Manufacturing.

DOI: 10.5220/0011058400003176

In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2022), pages 395-404

ISBN: 978-989-758-568-5; ISSN: 2184-4895

395

need to be used in each process. However, our in-

terviews with the manufacturing practitioners reveals

that production planning is not performed in an ef-

fective and precise way in manufacturing industries.

While the product requirements and related models

are typically speciﬁed in a standardized and better or-

ganized way (both in paper format and/or digital for-

mat), those speciﬁcations are mainly to do with deﬁn-

ing the product functionalities in its ﬁnal state. Infor-

mation related to how the product should be manufac-

tured is often missing or not sufﬁcient for process and

production planning. The production system require-

ments that will guide and restrict the choice of pro-

duction lines and their stations, the production pro-

cesses involved in each line along with the resources

to be used are often in different paper formats and are

complex to understand and use.

In our AITOC ITEA project, we conducted a sur-

vey among 16 manufacturing practitioners to under-

stand practitioners’ experiences with the current tools

they use for specifying the production planning re-

quirements. So, we observed that practitioners tend

to use the ofﬁce tools (mostly MS Excel) for specify-

ing the product and production system requirements.

One may use Excel to specify the requirements data in

the form of rows and columns and execute formulas

to perform calculations or Powerpoint to draw some

boxes and lines. However, such form of speciﬁcations

are not so helpful. It is not possible with the ofﬁce

tools to specify the requirements about different con-

cerns (e.g., investment, product, line, station, and pro-

cess) in a way that is easy to understand, communi-

cate, and trace. Indeed, the requirements for different

concerns cannot be separated and speciﬁed precisely.

Also, one may not use ofﬁce tools to analyse the re-

quirements speciﬁcations for such analysis goals as

completeness (i.e., the speciﬁcation includes all nec-

essary details), consistency (i.e., the requirements are

consistent with each other), and correctness (i.e., the

requirements are syntactically and semantically cor-

rect).

To address the problems discussed above, we con-

sider a model-based solution (Seidewitz, 2003; Whit-

tle et al., 2014), which provides such beneﬁts as the

separation of concerns, abstraction, graphical model-

ing, precise speciﬁcations, and tool support for mod-

eling editing and the automated model checking. So,

in this paper, we propose a new requirements mod-

eling language called ManLang and its supporting

modeling editor. ManLang supports the multiple-

viewpoints modeling and enables the production plan-

ning requirements to be separated into different view-

point models that each tackle with a particular con-

cern. The supported viewpoints are to do with (i)the

investment needed for a product, (ii)the product to

be manufactured, (iii)the production line in which the

product is manufactured, (iv)the stations employed in

the production lines, and (v)the production processes

operated on each line station. ManLang is essentially

intended for the speciﬁcations of requirements for di-

verse manufacturing domains and therefore enables

the viewpoint models (and their elements) to vary

depending on the domain needs. Indeed, one may

specify parameters for the viewpoint models and their

modeling elements to make them hold speciﬁc types

of information deﬁned by the users for the particu-

lar domain needs. ManLang deﬁnes the relationship

between the modeling viewpoints and those relation-

ships are ensured via the modeling editor for the trace-

ability between the viewpoint models. Moreover, the

modeling editor further checks for the completeness

and correctness of the viewpoint models, where the

former is concerned with if the viewpoint models in-

clude all the elements that are deﬁned by the language

and the latter is concerned with if the viewpoint mod-

els satisfy the language deﬁnition rules (e.g., the mul-

tiplicities and relationships).

In the rest of this paper, we ﬁrstly discuss the

related work about the general-purpose and domain-

speciﬁc languages that can be used for the production

planning requirements. Later, we introduce the Man-

Lang language in terms of the deﬁnitions of the view-

points. Next, we introduce the editor tool support for

ManLang. Lastly, we discuss the preliminary evalu-

ation of the ManLang and its editor tool via a survey

conducted among among a set of practitioners.

2 RELATED WORK

The literature includes several modeling approaches

that could be used for the modeling of production

planning requirements. As aforementioned, while

ofﬁce tools are highly popular, they do not aid in

the precise speciﬁcations of requirements that can be

interpreted in the same way by different stakehold-

ers and processed for analysis purposes. One may

alternatively use well-known, general-purpose mod-

eling languages such as SysML (Friedenthal et al.,

2008), UML (Rumbaugh et al., 2004), and BPMN

olzer, 2010). These languages have precise graph-

ical notation sets that could be used for the multiple-

viewpoints modeling. Note however that those mod-

eling languages have general-purpose scope and do

not offer notation set speciﬁc to the manufacturing do-

main. UML may be extended for the production plan-

ning domain with their proﬁling mechanism. How-

ever, with the proﬁling mechanism, one may not vio-

ENASE 2022 - 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

396

late the existing syntax and semantics rules for UML

and remove any elements. The new language must

also be a valid UML model. So, whenever the UML

language speciﬁcation is updated, the extended lan-

guage needs to be modiﬁed too. Also, the extended

language may only be used with the modeling tool

through which the proﬁling mechanism is used.

The literature also includes domain-speciﬁc mod-

eling languages (DSMLs) for the speciﬁcations of

manufacturing requirements, e.g., (Vjestica et al.,

2020; Weissenberger et al., 2015; Petrasch and

Hentschke, 2016; L

utjen and Rippel, 2015; Witsch

and Vogel-Heuser, 2012; Jiwei et al., 2008). Those

languages offer graphical and domain-speciﬁc nota-

tion sets for specifying manufacturing requirements.

However, the main point of interest herein is cen-

tered around the production process ﬂow modeling

rather than multiple-viewpoints modeling that encom-

passes a set of inter-related concerns about produc-

tion planning including the investment, product, and

production line and workstations concerns as is the

case with our approach. Vje

stica et al. (Vjestica

et al., 2020) proposed a modeling language for spec-

ifying the production processes at two levels of ab-

stractions. That is, ﬁrst the high-level process ﬂow

is speciﬁed, which is then detailed with execution-

speciﬁc details for such tools as simulators and digital

twin tools. Weißenberger et al. (Weissenberger et al.,

2015; Witsch and Vogel-Heuser, 2012) proposed a

modeling language that supports the speciﬁcations of

manufacturing requirements in terms of three view-

points: technical system, production process, and

MES model. The technical system viewpoint is con-

cerned with the technological structure of the plant

in which the product is manufactured. The produc-

tion process model is concerned with the process ﬂow

speciﬁcation in terms of activities and their transi-

tions. The MES model is concerned with the function

deﬁnitions in terms of input parameters and output re-

sults. Petrasch et al. (Petrasch and Hentschke, 2016)

proposed a modeling language based on BPMN that

enables to specify graphical production process mod-

els with the considerations of different Industry 4.0

aspects. That is, one may specify the process models

using such concepts as Cloud App, IoT devices, de-

vice data, actuation and sensing tasks, HCI, and mo-

bility which play key roles for the Industry 4.0 appli-

cations. L

utjen et al. (L

utjen and Rippel, 2015) pro-

posed a modeling approach called GRAMOSA that

promotes the modeling of production processes with

the consideration of material and control ﬂows. Jiwei

et al. (Jiwei et al., 2008) proposed a formal model-

ing approach for the production process ﬂows which

is based on the petri nets (Brauer et al., 1987) that en-

ables to specify formally analysable dynamic models

graphically.

Figure 1: ManLang’s viewpoint architecture.

3 ManLang OVERVIEW

ManLang supports multiple modeling viewpoints.

These are the investment, product, line, station and

process viewpoints. Each viewpoint deals with a dif-

ferent concern of production planning and is sup-

ported with a distinct notation set for the speciﬁca-

tions of solution models in that viewpoint. In the rest

of this section, the viewpoint deﬁnitions (i.e., meta-

model) are discussed where the viewpoint concepts

and their relations are depicted using UML’s class di-

agram notation.

Figure 1 shows that viewpoints are related to each

other via the composition (i.e., part-whole) relation-

ship. That is, if a viewpoint is composed of another

viewpoint, a model of the latter viewpoint may be ac-

cessible via the model of the former viewpoint. In-

deed, an investment viewpoint model enables a model

of the product viewpoint to be accessible. Also,

the viewpoints relate to each other with multiplici-

ties (e.g., 1..*), which constrain the number of the

viewpoint models that can be accessible from another

viewpoint model. Any product viewpoint model may

for instance enable one or more line viewpoint models

to be accessible.

Each viewpoint is deﬁned in terms of its meta-

model that consists of the concepts, attributes, and

their relationships of that viewpoint. A viewpoint

concept represents a modeling element for that view-

point. Any concept may include some attributes that

deﬁne the data structure of the associated modeling

element. Also, a concept may represent another view-

ManLang: A Requirements Modeling Language for the Production Planning in Manufacturing

397

point. That is, the modeling element for such a con-

cept is essentially a reference to a model of another

viewpoint. Concepts may relate to each other via the

composition relationship. That is, any modeling ele-

ment may include some other modeling elements.

Besides the meta-model deﬁnitions, each view-

point is associated with a concrete symbol list that

consists of a graphical symbol for each concept of that

viewpoint. Likewise, the concept attributes and rela-

tionships are also associated with graphical symbols.

So, users may use the symbols under certain rules so

as to specify the viewpoint models.

The abstract concepts and concrete symbols for

each viewpoint have been determined via a series

of interviews conducted with the manufacturers con-

tributing to our project

and inspired from the previ-

ous work conducted in another ITEA project called

ENTOC

which established the basis for our project.

Figure 2: The meta-model deﬁnition for the investment

viewpoint.

Figure 3: The concrete symbols for the investment view-

point.

https://itea4.org/project/entoc.html

3.1 Investment Viewpoint

The investment viewpoint is concerned with the in-

vestment to be made for any product manufacturing.

Figure 2 shows the meta-model deﬁnition of the

investment viewpoint, which consists of three con-

cepts – investment, product and parameter. The in-

vestment here is the main concept, which is deﬁned

in terms of the product and parameter concepts. An

investment element derived from the investment con-

cept may consist of zero or more parameters that

may be used to specify any data to be used concern-

ing the calculations for a product investment such as

the capacity, annual production, working days/hours,

robotic/manual time, and engineering cost. A param-

eter is speciﬁed with the data type, data identiﬁer, and

value attributes. The investment element may include

exactly one product derived from the product concept,

which represents the requirements of the product to be

invested and is speciﬁed with the product name and

model instantiated from the product viewpoint.

Figure 3 shows the concrete symbols that cor-

respond to the concepts deﬁned in the meta-model

given in Figure 2. The investment concept is mapped

to a graphical symbol, and whenever the symbol is

clicked, a new dialog box opens for specifying the

investment name, product details, and parameters.

Clicking product opens up another dialog box for

specifying the product name and the model element

which is clicked to open up a new sub-editor for spec-

ifying the product viewpoint model as discussed in

the next sub-section.

Figure 4: The meta-model deﬁnition for the product view-

point.

3.2 Product Viewpoint

The product viewpoint is concerned with any infor-

mation required for the product to be manufactured.

Figure 4 shows the meta-model deﬁnition of the

product viewpoint, which consists of four concepts

– product, product part, parameter and line. The

product herein is the main concept that represents the

product modeling element to be speciﬁed. A product

element derived from the product concept may consist

of the name attribute and the elements derived from

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398

Figure 5: The concrete symbols for the product viewpoint.

Figure 6: The meta-model deﬁnition for the line viewpoint.

Figure 7: The concrete symbols for the line viewpoint.

the rest of the concepts (i.e., product part, parameter,

and line). A product may have zero or more param-

eters, representing any data about the product to be

manufactured and speciﬁed in terms of the data type,

identiﬁer, and value attributes. A product may have

one or more line elements where the product parts are

processed to produce the end product. The produc-

tion of any product may be divided into multiple lines

each of which is responsible for a particular set of op-

erations to be performed on the product parts. Multi-

ple production lines may be located sequentially pro-

viding input (such as product parts, information, and

energy) to each other or in parallel (representing the

parallel operations to be performed on different parts).

Each line element here is modeled separately as a line

viewpoint model. Lastly, a product may be composed

of one or more product part elements, each represent-

ing a distinct part of the product that could be pro-

cessed over the line stations and speciﬁed in terms of

the name attribute and a set of parameters.

Figure 5 shows the concrete symbols for the prod-

uct viewpoint whose meta-model is given in Figure 4.

So, whenever the product model element is clicked in

the investment viewpoint model, a new editor opens

for specifying the product element with the graphi-

cal symbol shown here. Upon clicking the product

symbol, a new dialog box opens up for specifying

the product details (i.e., parameters, line and prod-

uct parts). Upon clicking the line conﬁguration on

the dialog box, a sub-editor opens for drawing a line

conﬁguration model in terms of the line elements and

their sequential/concurrent ﬂows. The red line on the

editor is employed for indicating the lines that operate

concurrently while the black directed arrow indicating

the lines operating sequentially.

Figure 8: The meta-model deﬁnition for the station view-

point.

3.3 Line Viewpoint

The line viewpoint is concerned with the require-

ments for a production line where the product parts

are processed together with other inputs (e.g., infor-

mation and energy) via the technical resources.

Figure 6 shows the meta-model deﬁnition of the

line viewpoint. So, the line element derived from the

line concept deﬁnition consists of the name attribute

ManLang: A Requirements Modeling Language for the Production Planning in Manufacturing

399

Figure 9: The concrete symbols for the station viewpoint.

and the elements derived from the parameter and sta-

tion concepts. A line element may be composed of

zero or more parameters, representing the data de-

scribing the production line (e.g., automation rate of

the line). A parameter is speciﬁed with the type of

data, the parameter identiﬁer and the data value. A

line element may also include one or more station el-

ements each of which represents a workstation where

a particular set of operation(s) are performed on the

product parts. The line stations may be designed to be

operated in parallel or sequentially. A station element

is modeled separately as a station viewpoint model

discussed in the next sub-section.

Figure 7 shows the concrete symbols for the line

viewpoint that correspond to the concepts deﬁned in

the meta-model given in Figure 6 . So, whenever a

line symbol speciﬁed in the line conﬁguration model

of the product viewpoint is clicked, a new dialog box

opens for specifying the line name, parameter list and

a station conﬁguration model. Whenever, the station

conﬁguration model is clicked on the dialog box, a

new sub-editor opens for specifying a station conﬁg-

uration in terms of the stations and their sequential/-

concurrent ﬂows. Note that the red line on the editor is

employed for indicating the stations that operate con-

currently while the black directed arrow indicating the

stations operating sequentially.

3.4 Station Viewpoint

The station viewpoint is concerned with the require-

ments about the workstations employed in a produc-

tion line where the product parts pass through some

processes that are relevant to that line.

Figure 8 shows the meta-model deﬁnition of the

station viewpoint, which consists of three concepts –

station, parameter, and process. Any station derived

from the station concept is composed of the name at-

tribute and the elements derived from the process and

parameter concepts. Each station element is speciﬁed

with zero or more parameters for specifying the data

about the station. A station element includes one or

more processes that perform operations on the prod-

uct parts with the use of technical resources. Multi-

ple processes for a station may be performed sequen-

tially or in parallel, where the former promotes the

processes to provide input to each other (e.g., product

parts) and the latter promotes the processes to work

on different product parts concurrently.

Figure 9 shows the concrete symbols for the sta-

tion viewpoint whose meta-model deﬁnition is given

in Figure 8. Whenever the station symbol is clicked

on a station conﬁguration model, a new dialog box

opens for specifying the station element in terms of

the name of the station, parameters, and the process

model. Whenever the process conﬁguration model

is clicked, a new sub-editor opens for specifying the

conﬁgurations of processes involved in the current

station in terms of the processes and their sequential/-

concurrent ﬂows. Note that the red line on the editor

is employed for indicating the processes that operate

concurrently while the black directed arrow indicat-

ing the processes operating sequentially.

3.5 Process Viewpoint

The process viewpoint is concerned with making de-

cisions about the production processes to be per-

formed in the line workstations. To deﬁne a process,

we use the VDI 3682 standard

, which offers a for-

malised process description. That is, each process is a

set of interacting actions in a system that transforms,

transports or stores product, energy or information.

Any process may accept some input (i.e., product, en-

ergy or information) and be performed by a technical

resource to produce some output (i.e., product, energy

or information). A process is essentially realised by a

resource that includes software which run on an em-

bedded device so as to execute the process behaviour.

Figure 10 shows the meta-model deﬁnition of the

process viewpoint. So, the process viewpoint includes

a process concept deﬁned in terms of the input, op-

eration, output, parameter and relationship concepts.

That is, a process element is speciﬁed with the ele-

ments derived from those concepts. Each process is

composed of at least one input, one output, and one

relationship. An input/output concept may include an

VDI: https://www.vdi.de/en/home/vdi-standards

ENASE 2022 - 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

400

element which derives from either one of the product

part, information, or energy concepts. Each process

is composed of one or more operations (e.g., shaping,

forming, cutting, joining, and coating). An operation

is speciﬁed with the name of the operation to be per-

formed and any data parameters about the operation.

An operation is linked with a resource to indicate that

each process is performed by exactly one resource.

Figure 10: The meta-model deﬁnition for the process view-

point.

A modeling element derived from each concept

may possess zero or more parameters to hold some

data and any parameter is speciﬁed in terms of the

data type, identiﬁer and value. A process concept is

also deﬁned with the relationship concept deﬁnitions.

The relationships are the essential part of the process

modeling, which compose the operations with the in-

puts and outputs (i.e., the product parts, information,

energy) and also the resources. For any relationship

element derived from the relationship deﬁnitions, the

name, from, and to attributes can be speciﬁed, where

the from attribute represents the input element and

the to attribute represents the output element. The

inputToOperation relationship represents the connec-

tion from any input elements to the operation, the op-

erationToOutput relationship represents the connec-

tion from an operation to any output element, and the

resourceToOperation relationship represents the con-

nection from a resource to the operation.

Figure 11 shows the concrete symbols for the pro-

cess viewpoint that correspond to the concepts de-

ﬁned in the meta-model given in Figure 10. So, when-

ever a process model element is clicked on the process

conﬁguration model that is speciﬁed as part of the sta-

tion viewpoint model, a new dialog box opens. Using

the dialog box, the process name and parameter list

can be speciﬁed. Also, whenever the process model

is clicked on the dialog box, a new sub-editor editor

opens as shown in Figure 12. With the newly opened

editor, the process model can be speciﬁed in terms of

the elements composing the process.

Figure 11: The concrete symbols for the process viewpoint.

4 TOOL SUPPORT

We developed a modeling editor for ManLang us-

ing the Metaedit+ meta-modeling tool (Kelly et al.,

2013). The editor may be downloaded via the project

webpage

. We used Metaedit+’s GOPPRR

technol-

ManLang: https://sites.google.com/view/manlang

GOPPRR web-site: https://www.metacase.com/

support/45/manuals/mwb/Mw-1 1.html

ManLang: A Requirements Modeling Language for the Production Planning in Manufacturing

401

Figure 12: A sample model speciﬁed using the process modeling viewpoint notation set.

Figure 13: ManLang’s modeling editor.

ogy to map the viewpoint deﬁnitions given in Sec-

tion 3 into the Metaedit+ environment. By doing

so, we obtained the modeling editor that enables to

specify the multiple-viewpoints models in accordance

with the ManLang deﬁnitions. Figure 13 shows how

ManLang’s editor can be used to specify the require-

ments for a production planning, starting with the in-

vestment requirements and ending with the process

ﬂow model. So, the viewpoint models for any produc-

tion planning are speciﬁed separately but connected to

each other and one may traverse different viewpoint

models starting from the investment model.

The modeling editor has been extended with an

analyser that can check the viewpoint models for

completeness and completeness. The editor ensures

completeness by checking whether the viewpoint

models are speciﬁed completely with regard to the no-

tation set of the language viewpoint deﬁnitions. For

instance, the product viewpoint model that does not

have name or any product parts or the process view-

ENASE 2022 - 17th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering

402

point model that does not include any resource spec-

iﬁcation are considered to be incomplete. Such in-

complete models are determined by the editor at mod-

eling time and the users are warned with meaningful

messages. The editor ensures correctness by check-

ing whether the viewpoint models are correct with

regard to the meta-model deﬁnitions. That is, each

viewpoint model needs to satisfy the multiplicity and

relationship rules between the concepts as deﬁned in

the viewpoint meta-model. For instance, each station

viewpoint model may be composed of a single pro-

cess model and each investment viewpoint model may

be composed of a single product model. If more than

one process/product model is tried to be included, this

leads to incorrect speciﬁcations and thus the editor in-

dicates an error at modeling time.

5 PRELIMINARY EVALUATION

We prepared a usability survey using the well-

established usability questionnaire, i.e., System Us-

ability Scale (SUS) (Brooke, 1996). We prepared 10

different Yes/No questions, where participants are ex-

pected to choose a single answer. To enhance preci-

sion, we designed a scale of answers from 1 (strongly

disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). We executed our sur-

vey among the participants of our project

including

the practitioners from such manufacturers as TOFAS¸,

Ford Otosan, and Volvo. We initially organised a sep-

arate meeting for each manufacturer and introduced

our language and its toolset. Then, we asked the par-

ticipants to ﬁll in our survey that is published online

via google form. In total, we got 13 participations for

our survey. Some of the interesting survey results are

listed below.

• 46% of the participants can frequently use Man-

Lang for the modeling of production planning re-

quirements, while another 46% are unsure and

seem to have a lack of knowledge and experience

to state their agreement/disagreement.

• 67% of the participants disagree that ManLang’s

notation set is complex at all.

• 62% of the participants agree that ManLang easy

to use for the modeling of production planning re-

quirements.

• 31% of the participants think that technical sup-

port (e.g., user manual, tutorials, and help desk)

is needed to use ManLang and its toolset, while

30% do not have enough knowledge again.

• 54% of the participants agree that ManLang does

not include any inconsistencies about the lan-

guage deﬁnitions and tool support, while 31% do

not have enough knowledge.

• 76% of the participants agree that most people

would learn to use ManLang very quickly.

• 67% of the participants disagree that ManLang is

cumbersome to use.

• 42% of the participants agree that they can con-

ﬁdently use ManLang, while 25% do not have

enough knowledge and another 33% disagree.

• 31% of the participants disagree that they need to

learn a lot of things before they could get going

with ManLang, while another 39% do not have

enough knowledge.

It should be noted that we consider the survey

results to have some initial idea about industry’s

thoughts on ManLang. To be able to receive more

precise feedback, we are planning to conduct one-to-

one interview with each participant where the partici-

pant will be asked to spend some time with ManLang

and its editor via simple case-studies and share their

thoughts over a set of open-ended questions.

6 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, a new modeling language called Man-

Lang has been proposed for specifying the production

planning requirements early at the beginning of man-

ufacturing. ManLang offers a graphical notation set

for multiple-viewpoints modeling, which offers a sep-

arate (sub-)notation set for 5 different viewpoints (in-

vestment, product, production line, workstation, and

process). The investment viewpoint is concerned with

the information regarding the investment to be made

for any product manufacturing, the product viewpoint

is concerned with the parts composing the products

and any requirements data describing the product and

its parts, the line viewpoint is concerned with the con-

ﬁguration of the production lines and their require-

ments data, the station viewpoint is concerned with

the conﬁgurations of the workstations for each line

and any data about the stations, and lastly the process

viewpoint is concerned with the resources involved in

each station which perform processes on the product

parts, energy, information so as to produce some out-

put. ManLang is further supported with a modeling

editor, which enables to specify the viewpoint models

separately while establishing the traceability links be-

tween them. The editor tool also enables to check the

viewpoint models in accordance with the wellformed-

ness rules deﬁned in each viewpoint meta-model.

Our short-term goal is to conduct interview ses-

sions with a group of practitioners to improve the

ManLang: A Requirements Modeling Language for the Production Planning in Manufacturing

403

language deﬁnitions. We will also develop a model

transformation tool using the Metaedit+ technologies

so as to transform the ManLang models in accor-

dance with the AutomationML standard (Drath et al.,

2008), which is supported by other manufacturing

tools and thus enables to process the modeled re-

quirements in ManLang by different tools. We will

further extend ManLang for the speciﬁcations of re-

source behaviours (e.g., spot welding robots) and de-

velop a transformation tool for Modelica (Mattsson

et al., 1998) which enables to use the simulation tools

that support Modelica.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is part of the AITOC (Artiﬁcial Intelligence

supported Tool Chain in Manufacturing Engineering)

project supported by European ITEA and funded by

the TUBITAK TEYDEB Project No: 9200078.

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