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

In manufacturing industries, production planning involves making early decisions about the design and production 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 automated 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.