MES Dynamic interoperability for SMEs in the Factory of the Future perspective

Abstract

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) hold a significant proportion in the economy and more than half of employment worldwide. Nowadays, many SMEs are embarking on a digital transformation journey by embracing and deploying the Fourth Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. Industry 4.0) technologies with a vision of the “Factory of the Future”. Factory of the future aims to enhance production by making improvements in three dimensions: plant structure, plant digitization, and plant processes, which cut across many key function areas of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) such as management of product definitions, resource scheduling, order execution and dispatch, production analysis, product quality, and materials track and trace. The technological shift with the Factory of the Future, e.g., the adoption of information, communication, and networking technologies in the form of the cyber-physical production system (CPPS) in order to manage interoperability at the factory’s functional levels in real-time, demands a fresh look at the functional aspects of MES as well as the interplays between MES and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and a process control system (e.g., SCADA). The Factory of the Future may lead to hierarchical changes in MES byways of redesigning the value chain for dynamic production and mass personalization scenarios. Deployment of the responsive and adaptive value chain in MES is still state-of-art-issue. The authors will address dynamic interoperability between modular functionalities for end-to-end integration and consider microservices scenarios to form a service-oriented architecture that supports the part of MES in the responsive and adaptive industrial value chain. Primary modules of the manufacturing execution system have been identified from ISA-95 standards and demonstration of end-to-end integration via OPC-UA server/client and PubSub mechanism contributing to the execution of business and manufacturing functions. Each element or activity runs in its own process and provides a microservice; each microservice communicate with other services and form a service-oriented architecture for MES. Finally, a universal framework solution has been proposed for dynamic interoperability, which intends to upgrade the value chain and networking of a conventional industry towards a factory of the future. © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.