Achieving parametric transparency in model-based factory planning

The planning of new factories, as well as the re-planning of existing factories, has become more frequent due to increasingly changing business requirements, as for example shorter product life cycles and Industry 4.0. A higher number of involved planners and the resulting high amount of planning information strongly require coordination. In this context, the importance of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in factory planning rises as it provides a method of integrated building planning and planning validation by means of 3D software and object-oriented modelling. However, despite the use of BIM, there are still major interface problems in factory planning that cannot be solved by the still manual plausibility checks of non-geometrical planning information. To enable automatic checking of planning results, thereby improving the BIM-based factory planning process, machine-readable explication of the parametric dependencies are required between different planning fields such as production planning and building planning. The goal of this paper is to show parametric and thus non-geometric dependencies that exist between the sub-models of BIM-based factory planning in such a way that software agents can automatically evaluate this design information. Within the planning interface between production planning and building planning, the paper focusses on the particular exchange between the planning of the manufacturing system and the planning of a cutting fluid pump. With the involvement of domain experts from factory planning, systems engineering and production engineering, we as the authors have managed to develop a coherent system of block diagrams, constraint diagrams and parametric diagrams that explicate the focused interface in a machine-readable manner. We believe our accomplishments are an essential element for completely automated planning validation in BIM-based factory planning and general object-oriented modelling in the future.

The taxlist package: managing plant taxonomic lists in R

Taxonomic lists are crucial elements of vegetation-plot databases and provide the links between original entries, reference taxon views and different taxon concepts. We introduce the R package taxlist in the context of object-oriented modelling for taxonomic lists. This package provides a data structure based on species lists in Turboveg, which is a software broadly used for the storage of vegetation-plot databases and implements functions for importing and handling them prior to statistical analysis. We also present a schema for relational databases, compatible with taxlist objects and recommend its use for handling diversity records.