A survey of industrial process modelling across the product and process lifecycle

Modelling has become a central activity in most major corporations and SMEs. Modern processing and manufacturing is a “model centric” activity that pervades the whole product and process lifecycle. Within organizations there is a wide range of modelling practices that determine the efficacy of the modelling tasks in providing crucial information for decision making across the lifecycle. In order to inform modelling practitioners and developers of modelling and simulation systems, an international survey was carried out to ascertain the current state of play in process modelling practice in industry. The results presented here show some significant challenges exist for developers of modelling systems, but more importantly for internal organizational practices in corporations, to ensure that process modelling is efficient and derives maximum benefit for the organization.