Towards a Generalized Template for Smart Manufacturing Use Cases

This paper presents on-going efforts made to develop a unified template for smart manufacturing (SM) use cases. As the modern manufacturing system getting more and more complex and “smarter”, the Use case methodology becomes useful for system requirements management and specifying standards to support the system level functions. It has been used to identify the challenges of the AI and big data application [1, 2], but also the realization of smart gird projects [3]. The starting point is to set up a template in order to gather and analysis use cases in a consistent manner. Thus, this paper presents: 1) analysis of the use cases collected by standardization organizations such as ISO/JTC 1, IEC/TC 65 etc.; 2) comparison of the use case templates to reveal the mapping rules; 3) a unified template is proposed to facilitate comparison and analysis of SM use cases; The unified template could be the basis for the future SM use cases repository, thereby facilitating the development of standards and realization of SM applications.