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| Introduction (implementers) | Date: 2008/02/25 13:13:05 Revision: 1.7 |
The DEXs are intended to specify a set of information that is to be exchanged to support a particular business process. The information specified by a DEX is a subset of the STEP standard: "ISO 10303-239:2005(E) Industrial automation systems and integration - Product data representation and exchange Part 239: Application protocol: Product life cycle support"
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Explanation of EXPRESS-G and instance diagrams goes here
Explanation of part 21 / part 28 goes here
Explanation of DEXs goes here.
There are a number of parts of the PLCS model that will be common to many DEXs. (e.g. date and time). Rather than each DEX replicating the usage guidance for these, they are packaged into chapters called "Capabilities" that are reused across different DEXs. So a DEX is constructed from a set of capabilities and each capability describes the set of PLCS entities that are required to represent a particular concept. For example the representation of a part, an assignment of an identifier. The reuse of a capability in multiple DEXs ensures the same concept is interpreted consistently in the different DEXs. E.g. A date is assignment to a person and a product in the same way in all DEXs.
The information model that the capability uses is presented as an EXPRESS-G diagram. This has been extracted from ISO 10303-239 ().
From an implementation perspective, the capability defines a data pattern that any implementation must support if the concept covered by the capability is in the scope of the implementation. This pattern will be reused in every DEX that use the capability. Such patterns are formalised in a Capability as Templates. These are described in the section Capability Templates .
A capability describes how to represent a particular concept, such as the representation of a part. For every concept there is additional information that can be associated with it, such as the assignment of a date, the assignment of an organization. This is referred to as characterization, and each capability will have a section describing the characterization of the concept.