With the rapid development of the electronics manufacturing industry, the application of MES production management system is becoming more and more common. Many manufacturing companies have purchased or independently developed MES suitable for their own factories, aiming to achieve the goal of smart factories (workshops). As the core of intelligent manufacturing, MES management system solutions are playing an increasingly important role in the intelligent transformation and upgrading of enterprises. However, in practice, there are many problems in the domestic MES system market, such as low degree of standardization, long project implementation cycle, and the difficulty of the system to accurately meet the individual needs of enterprises, etc., resulting in a high failure rate of project launch.
The fundamental reason is that there are differences in the production process and management requirements of different products and different processes. The difference in operation and management process is also one of the main core competitiveness of manufacturing enterprises in the era of serious product homogeneity. In other words, manufacturing companies need a tailor-made digital manufacturing system to meet individual operational management demands.
At present, the status quo of most MES management systems in China is as follows:
First, MES systems have failed to achieve standardization. Although many recommended standards for MES have been formulated at home and abroad, domestic enterprise developers rarely pay attention to the guiding role of standards when implementing MES systems, and the products of MES systems are complicated.
Secondly, with the goal of rapid secondary development and delivery, no attention is paid to the evolution of software product architecture and secondary development requirements, and the software architecture seriously lags behind the development of information technology.
Accuracy, refinement, and collaboration are important features of MES, otherwise production cannot run efficiently and with high quality. The information system that uses experience and feeling to make plans and manage on-site is called MES, which is not worthy of the name to a certain extent. Therefore, creating a low-cost, flexible and configurable next-generation manufacturing digital system may be the key to breaking the current MES market.
Platform-based and assembled applications, high configurability for business personnel, and cross-domain modeling for business objects are the characteristics of the evolution trend of MES system technology architecture generally believed in the industry. Professionals believe that high configurability for business personnel is a key feature of the next-generation manufacturing digital system, and there are different technical routes for high configurability.
Through visual modeling of business objects and domain activities, it supports multi-layer expansion of sub-industry processes and sub-enterprise organizations, and is expected to help domestic manufacturing companies solve the problem of flexible configurability of MES systems for business personnel.
In the following content, through studying and analyzing the architecture of foreign advanced MES intelligent manufacturing systems, we will make technical considerations for the next generation of domestic manufacturing digital systems.
The new generation of MES manufacturing system integrates the low-code platform, IoT data platform and MES system into the same data model for business objects, providing a fully modular MES solution with strong configurability, which can meet the production requirements of different processes Personalized demands of operation and management process.
Two characteristics of the manufacturing system architecture:
(1) Combination of MES and IoT data platform
The Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and the Internet of Things (IoT) use a unified system interface to realize the interconnection and intercommunication of data information. According to the MES functional hierarchy model defined by ISO, the MES software architecture is divided into three functional modes of data acquisition layer, data integration platform layer and application layer as a whole. First of all, the data acquisition layer of MES uses the recognition and perception technology of the perception layer of the Internet of Things technology to obtain real-time data of the workshop, and performs intelligent calculation, processing and management through the MES data integration platform; then, with the help of the network layer of the Internet of Things, data transmission and The application is uploaded and distributed by the decision-making layer; finally, the data exchange is carried out through the information storage in the background to achieve real-time information sharing. Data is the medium for the integration of the Internet of Things and MES, the Internet of Things technology is the means and supporting force for the system to realize online monitoring and real-time monitoring, and the manufacturing execution system is the core strength of the entire system.
(2) Combination of MES and 3D digital twin/augmented reality technology
On the basis of traditional data visualization (BI report/industrial configuration) technical capabilities, the new generation of MES manufacturing system provides the ability to combine 3D digital twin and augmented reality AR technology to help factory customers build a 3D view of the digital twin workshop and provide better The interactive experience improves the efficiency and reliability of manufacturing execution operations, and improves the real-time insights of MES data.
The reason why MES is called Manufacturing Execution System puts a lot of emphasis on the word "execution": on the one hand, the ERP production plan is decomposed into each equipment according to the actual situation of the workshop, and each process is carefully executed every minute, and transparent Accurate management; on the other hand, in the workshop, a fully closed-loop management such as planning and scheduling, job execution, data collection, work-in-progress management, inventory management, and quality management is formed, which is closely linked, rather than a simple database management system .