Digitalization of manufacturing execution systems: The core technology for realizing future smart factories

In recent years manufacturing companies have been faced with different challenges, in particular with an increasing level of variability. The variability implies different set of dimensions such as demand, volume, process, manufacturing technology, customer behaviour and supplier attitude, transforming industrial systems engineering domain. This trend is now even accelerating with a direct impact on the value chain and related physical supply chains as well as factory design and management. Several national strategy and new technological roadmaps, such as the German high tech strategy "Industrie 4.0" or the Italian cluster "Fabbrica Intelligente", aim at approaching this transformation enhancing the flexibility and re-configurability of current manufacturing systems among many other competitive dimensions; new emerging and potential enabling technologies could allow a next generation of manufacturing systems towards real implementation of smart factories. This paper introduces technological concepts of Industry 4.0 and related enabling technologies (such as Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS), the Internet of Things, and the Internet of Services) that could support decentralization and manufacturing flexibility. Their application allows to orchestrate and execute manufacturing and production processes with the aim of supporting individualized production, small lot sizes, small batches and provide advanced decision support. The final research aim is to identify and define digitalized opportunities for specific type of flexibility that has an impact on the manufacturing system starting from an analysis of potential improvements of current Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). For each flexibility type (variant spectrum, expansion, scheduling and volume), the scope is to demonstrate the principal contributions expected by using specific use cases described in terms of process improvement. The identified flexibility type in manufacturing systems are discussed and contrasted with the various reconfiguration use cases, which include specifically the planning, orchestration, and optimization of production processes within MES. Finally, the use cases presented by these manufacturing paradigms are discussed in order to demonstrate how far decentralization and self-organization can be driven to the achieving Industry 4.0 key requirements.