Plan Executor MES: Manufacturing Execution System Combined with a Planner for Industry 4.0 Production Systems

Industry 4.0 production systems have to enable flexibility in products, processes, and available production resources. Types of production resources can vary not only during maintenance process of the production systems, but also at runtime. Manufacturing recipes and assignments to production resources can no longer be hard-coded in automation and control systems, but the production has to be planned and scheduled dynamically with regards to the current status of the production systems and of customer needs. This paper proposes an architecture for a new generation of manufacturing execution systems that are tightly coupled with planners. The proposed approach is demonstrated on the Industry 4.0 Testbed use-case. An exemplary production plan deals with a robotic assembly of a construction made up from Lego bricks.