Towards Flexible Control of Production Processes: A Requirements Analysis for Adaptive Workflow Management and Evaluation of Suitable Process Modeling Languages

In the context of Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods are used to maximize the efficiency and flexibility of production processes. The adaptive management of such semantic processes can optimize energy and resource efficiency while providing high reliability, but it depends on the representation type of these models. This paper provides a literature review of current Process Modeling Languages (PMLs). Based on a suitable PML, the flexibility of production processes can be increased. Currently, a common understanding of this process flexibility in the context of adaptive workflow management is missing. Therefore, requirements derived from the business environment are presented for process flexibility. To enable the identification of suitable PLMs, requirements regarding this are also raised. Based on these, the PMLs identified in the literature review are evaluated. Thereby, based on a preselection, a detailed examination of the seven most promising languages is performed, including an example from a real smart factory. As a result, a recommendation is made for the use of BPMN, for which it is presented how it can be enriched with separate semantic information that is suitable for the use of AI planning and, thus, enables flexible control.