The Orchestration Designer and Runtime component is responsible for allowing users to model multiple manufacturing workflows to orchestrate the various assets available within a collaborative framework.

To support the objectives of i4FS a tool needs to be created and then used that allows the orchestration of various i4FS assets (components, sub-components or zApps) and other services.

The Orchestration Designer is a visual online reactive canvas allowing a business process designer to pull in existing models from a library representing the virtualised manufacturing assets. Each asset may support additional properties that can be defined. The defined workflow can consist of sub workflows and be saved and versioned within the storage as (eg BPMN 2.0) model definitions.

The Orchestration Runtime is based on open source BPMN engine Camunda and provides a “super layer” on top of it to manage process instances, user tasks, service to service communication, and the NodeJS Code Generator upgraded from the vf-OS project.

Benefits 

• Create standard BPMN diagrams to describe business process using a web editor

• Connect internal i4FS services together to support business process operations, along with other services published in i4FS Marketplace

• Create tasks that must be done by humans, describing their inputs and outputs

• Start/Stop/Troubleshoot business process instances

• Provide inputs for awaiting tasks