Cyber–Physical Systems for Open-Knowledge-Driven Manufacturing Execution Systems

TLDR

Manufacturing execution systems bridge enterprise functions and production, and modern embedded systems enable cyber‑physical systems that can control operations and communicate IP‑based, yet designing open‑knowledge‑driven MES requires maintaining system‑state awareness across many devices to avoid disruptive actions. The study presents an approach for building an open‑knowledge‑driven MES atop cyber‑physical systems to coordinate robot workstations and conveyor‑based pallet transport. The authors implement the OKD‑MES by integrating cyber‑physical control of robot workstations with conveyor‑based pallet transport, demonstrating the architecture and coordination mechanisms.

Abstract

Manufacturing execution systems play an important role of bridging high-level enterprise functions and production or manufacturing operations. The embedded systems are usually in charge of controlling execution of the operations. Modern embedded systems have become capable of simultaneous and deterministic execution of control algorithms and IP-based communication, making it possible to create complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs), where the computational and communication resources of a device can be used directly for various control, supervisory, or monitoring functions. The complexity for defining open-knowledge-driven manufacturing execution system (OKD-MES) is in maintaining awareness of overall system state to avoid disruptive actions as various functions may be requested from a system. The problem is that obtaining such information on system state may necessitate collecting data from a number of devices, as there may not be a single data point for state information. This paper describes and illustrates an approach for designing OKD-MES on top of CPSs that controls robot workstations and conveyor-based transportation system of a pallet-based production system.