PFDL: A Production Flow Description Language for an Order-Controlled Production

In Industry 4.0, the order-controlled production (OCP) is an order-centric manufacturing approach. Among others, OCP favors a dynamic (re-)assignment of production resources that are required to execute the order. In this paper, we propose a uniform description format of production processes - the Production Flow Description Language (PFDL) - a fully automated processable input for OCP environments. The PFDL enables flexible use of existing production resources by taking advantage of the increased factory floor connectivity. Compared to existing solutions, the PFDL supports concurrency, data handling between processes, synchronization, and flow control.