ISA-88 Formalization. A Step Towards its Integration with the ISA-95 Standard

ANSI/ISA-88 and ANSI/ISA-95 are two well accepted standards in the industrial domain that provide a set of models considered as best engineering practices for industrial information systems in charge of manufacturing execution and business logistics. The main goal of ANSI/ISA-88 is the control of batch processes, whereas the one of the ANSI/ISA-95 standard is the development of an automated interface between enterprise and control systems. In consequence, both standards should interoperate. However, there are gaps and overlappings between their corresponding terminologies. Moreover, there are additional problems, such as semantic inconsistencies within each of the standards, as well as the use of an informal graphical representations in one of the ANSI/ISA-88 models. This work presents an ontological approach that aims at formalizing the ISA-88 standard as a first step towards its integration with a formal representation of the ANSI/ISA-95 one. Additionally, methodological aspects of the ontology development process are presented.