Information exchanges in a cross-disciplinary supply chain: formal strategy and application

A supply chain is often considered as a network of facilities and distribution options provided by industrial companies. Many industrial organisations encounter interoperability problems amongst their software systems, particularly when the organisations belong to different industrial sectors, such as manufacturing and construction. Incompatibility amongst syntax and semantics of the languages used is the most common cause of this problem. The Process Specification Language (PSL), now ISO 18629 standard, has the potential to overcome some of these difficulties by acting as a neutral communication language. The aim of this paper is to propose a formal strategy facilitating those exchanges.