Title: Development of manufacturing execution system with production modelling approaches

Authors: Yunqing Rao, Wei Zhou, Fei He

Addresses: State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China. ' State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China. ' State Key Laboratory of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China

Abstract: 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 constraints 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.

Keywords: production process modelling; manufacturing execution systems; MES; workflow management; production modelling; product upgrading; resource constraints; automobile industry; engine assembly; automotive assembly; vehicle engines.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIMS.2010.033937

International Journal of Internet Manufacturing and Services, 2010 Vol.2 No.3/4, pp.265 - 280

Published online: 05 Jul 2010 *

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