HoVer: A modeling framework for horizontal and vertical integration

The German working committee for “Industrie 4.0” identified the horizontal integration throughout value networks and the vertical integration of networked manufacturing systems as key issues in the context of smart factories. For this purpose we aim for a universal model-driven industrial engineering framework spanning over production chains and value networks. Thereby, we build up on the Resource Event Agent (REA) business ontology (ISO/IEC 15944-4) to describe external activities requiring horizontal integration with business partners and internal activities serving for vertical integration within a manufacturing enterprise. We plan to apply the ISA-95 industry standard (ANSI/ISA-95; DIN EN 62264) to describe the vertical integration within an enterprise and its decentralized, networked production plants. As a first step, presented in this paper, we extend the REA ontology by useful concepts known from ISA-95 towards an integrating modeling framework.