Development of manufacturing execution system with production modelling approaches

Rapid changes of market demands and pressures of competition required manufacturers to maintain highly flexible manufacturing systems. As more and more manufacturing execution systems were used in real industry, it was not feasible to build the MES systems from scratch every time. Even in the plants that were running the MESs, these systems must be configurable to adapt the products upgrading. In this work, we presented a MES model based on workflow technology. The configurable architecture was introduced. With this new architecture, the developers could model the production process visually and set the resource constrains rapidly. Some key implement methods were also introduced in this paper. A successful application of an automobile engine assembly line shows that using of this kind of architecture promotes the progress of development and reduces the manufactures' cost. Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.