Design Patterns for Description-Driven Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores design patterns that enable the integration of product and process models in data systems, focusing on description-driven systems that unify product data management and workflow management.

Contribution

It identifies existing design patterns and gaps for integrating product and process models, and demonstrates a unified meta-model for PDM and WfM integration.

Findings

Existing patterns facilitate integration in some areas

Gaps and missing patterns are identified for full integration

A unified meta-model effectively combines PDM and WfM data

Abstract

In data modelling, product information has most often been handled separately from process information. The integration of product and process models in a unified data model could provide the means by which information could be shared across an enterprise throughout the system lifecycle from design through to production. Recently attempts have been made to integrate these two separate views of systems through identifying common data models. This paper relates description-driven systems to multi-layer architectures and reveals where existing design patterns facilitate the integration of product and process models and where patterns are missing or where existing patterns require enrichment for this integration. It reports on the construction of a so-called description-driven system which integrates Product Data Management (PDM) and Workflow Management (WfM) data models through a common meta-model.