ISO 15531 MANDATE: A Product-process-resource based Approach for Managing Modularity in Production Management

Managing modularity and commonality in product development more and more needs modularity and commonality in the production process, with the objectives of reducing manufacturing costs, time to market and improving quality. A critical issue is the way of managing data, information and knowledge: data most of the time structured according to data models, often using proprietary formats, leading to consistency problems for the exchanges. The use of international standards is a good way of improving quality of the information systems used in production management, since they facilitate interoperability of the software tools used. They also contribute to the integration of the production process in a product life cycle management-based approach. This study presents the ISO 15531 MANDATE standard for the exchanges of industrial manufacturing management data. In terms of industrial maturity, MANDATE is a new standard, whose development is based on research work done by the authors and whose parts have not reached the IS status (necessary for sake of stability) at the same time. For this reason, the different models proposed by the standard have not been implemented altogether at the same time. Indeed numerous standards do exist in the domain of production information management, however the information models proposed are not always compatible in between them, the vocabulary used is not defined in the same way even though the terms used are the same: ontology-based approaches are sometimes necessary to find the common `essence' of the information handled, but they can be integrated in software interfaces, thus making easier to convey a higher level of semantics in the exchanges. This study presents one of those approaches, defined in the INTEROP NoE EC funded project.