Minutes of 2nd meeting of OASIS Production Planning/Scheduling (PPS) Technical Committee

Date: 10:00 ~ 12:00 on 17 March 2004

Location: Hotel Arcadia Ichigaya, Room Ibuki, Tokyo

Attendees:

Yasuyuki Nishioka: PSLX Consortium

Hiroshi Kojima: PSLX Consortium

Hideichi Okamune: PSLX Consortium

Shinya Matsukawa: Hitachi

Yukio Hamaguchi: Hitachi

Tomohiko Maeda: Fujitsu

Masahiro Mizutani: Nihon Unisys

Tomoichi Sato: individual

Kouichi Wada: Infoteria

Hiroaki Sasaki: individual

Akihiro Kawauchi: individual

Observers

Keizou Okabe: OASIS

Masatoshi Ishibashi: NEC

Materials:

OASIS PPSTC Face-to-Face Meeting Program

Minutes of OASIS PPSTC 1st Meeting

PSLX Technical Forum 2004 Guide

PPT materialof OASIS/PSLX Standard Web Service Specification

PPS (Production Planning/Scheduling) Web Service Specification (Draft J01)

  1. Welcome by Convener

The chair (Nishioka) welcomed members to the inaugural meeting of the TC. This TC has various responses from home and abroad and has been expected since it was established. In PSLX Consortium, implementations are realized within the scope of this TC and we will advance standardization in this TC following the implementations.

  1. Roll call

Mr. Masatoshi Ishibashi (NEC) who attended the meeting as observer for the first time introduced himself.

  1. Announcement by OASIS

Mr. Okabe announced that Japanese news about OASIS was distributed in ML and a Japanese site of OASIS would be established. In the Japanese site, Japanese version of results will be carried in Japanese mailing list. Note that input in Japanese is available also in the English site.

  1. Mr. Patrick Gannon visitingJapan

Mr. Patrick Gannon, CEO of OASIS will come to Japan on April 5 to 6. We discussed whether PPS TC would hold a meeting. Since the chair (Nishioka) will be absent during his visit, TC won’t hold a meeting. We are individually going to attend the meeting (sociable) set by XML Consortium as observer.

5. Report of Action Progress

The chair (Nishioka) reported the action progress from the first meeting to the present time.

The principal activities are three points as follows:

・The scenario of Web services for actual manufacturing users was completed and implemented as part of demo program development for Microsoft Office 2003.

・A Web service site was built for empirically experimenting scheduler linkage in PSLX Consortium Technical Forum.

・Domain objects corresponding to a core component in PPS could be redefined in the form closer to implementation.

Through the above activities, the bone structure of Web service specification was made and considered by PSLX Technical Committee and then the initial version of specification was finished as a draft. This draft is also a material of this meeting in an OASIS format. In short, a basis for discussing PPS specification has steadily been built in parallel with implementation.

6. Cooperation with Related Outside Organizations

Up to this time, Mr. Em dera Hoitria, the chair of ISO/TC184/SC5 and Mr. Greg Winchester of the secretariat and Nishioka discussed making the specifications for ISO and a possibility of cooperation at NEMA. And also we are contacting the group of ISA S95. Part 3 of ISA95 is interested in PSLX and there is a great possibility to cooperate with OASIS PPSTC.

7. Explanation of Specification Draft

The chair (Nishioka) explained the outline of Web service specification created by PSLX Consortium at the present time following the PPT materials. However this is only a reference material and doesn’t restrict the structure of this TC specification. It is possible to take a lot of information out of this specification because simultaneous implementation progress is highly regarded. The main points were explained as follows:

(1) The goal is to decide the concrete interface specification.

(2) XML schema is used after finely adjusting the complete schema.

(3) SOAP specification, a communication system for Web service is defined.

(4) The outside specification is used for security.

(5) As for communication pattern, business flow isn’t defined and the definition is minimized.

(6) There are synchronous type, asynchronous type and relay type.

(7) There are 6 service patterns.

(8) The basic elements of contents are 10.

(9) Schema is decided as contents specification.

(10) A method of querying must be specified during querying.

(11) A method of converting PSLX to SQL for query is decided as specification.

We discussed whether a Web services (in a narrow sense such as SOAP and WSDL) was pushed. We had the opinion that only a Web service was regarded as important because implementation could be progressed simultaneously and it was considerable to cooperate with other OASIS TCs. On the other hand, there was also the opinion that mail-based protocols like ebMS were very useful for B2B and so they should not be overlooked.

8. Discussion of TC Specification Composition Draft

The following contents were discussed as a composition draft of specification contents. The composition draft couldn’t be decided as the final resolution and only the contents to be included in the specification were approved. We would refer other OASIS TCs for composition.

(1) Purpose and scope

(2) Term definitions

(3) Object models

(4) XML schema (proposed for rules)

(5) Web service specification (proposed for rules)

(6) Procedure to verify standard and definition of standard extension method (proposed for rules)

(7) Reference

The above boldface is strictly defined as rules and the others are a part of specification as reference information. The Web service specification mentioned here includes communication patterns, methods of querying information, detailed services and error messages as explained in PSLX examples.

Besides the above, we consider that WSDL and XSL schemata are output of this TC as a part of specification. We don’t decide whether the schemata are taken as a part of the specification or a separate volume at the present time. Moreover we have the opinion that programming samples or implementations are also taken as TC output.

9. Introduction of contents of PSLX Technical Forum

The outline of PSLX Technical Forum 2004 that would be held in this afternoon was introduced. Six scheduler vendors would demonstrate how to program PSLX specification into a product. Each company may announce no later than in this spring that the specification will be made into a product.

10. Future work schedule

1) The contents of other specifications such as EXAML will be examined and distributed in ML. (Wada)

2) Discussion will be made on ML more actively.

June 2004: 3rd meeting

September 2004: 4th meeting The last draft will be finished.

Adjournment.