Manufacturing execution systems for customized production

Mass customised manufacturing is a current tendency in many production sectors. In this scenario, the client details the desired product often using informatics means and respecting available options. This customisation context imposes systemic integration and co-operations between the concerned manufacturing entities to explore their capabilities, aiming at adaptability to the product heterogeneity. An integration element of the management system and systems related to the shop floor is the manufacturing execution system (MES). A conceivable way to allow MES supporting this customised e-manufacturing is the concept of smart-product, where each product “drives ” its own production, allowing a decoupling between production and order dispatching, as well as the consistency between physical and informational flows. A smart-product requests services from manufacturing resources and it can compete for them. These resources must co-operate based on their features and based on some established flexible co-operation logic, aiming to carry out smart-products requests. However, this is by itself another issue, firstly due to the heterogeneity of factory resources. Looking for homogenisation and integration of this diversity, resources and also smart-products may be “encapsulated” inside of communicating entities called “holons ”. However, the composition of holonic MES (H-MES) is not trivial, because of the dynamic between all holons may be complex. Previous studies presented the organisation of resource-HLs co-operation carried out by computational entities called “rules”. In this paper, it is proposed a conceptual solution of a meta-model for rules-oriented and product-driven H-MES and its application for the holonification of a design and simulation tool.