Developing a Hybrid Deployment Model for Highly Available Manufacturing Execution Systems

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are the digital core of every industrial production and require to be always operational. Migrating the MES to the cloud can harvest benefits such as higher utilization, more flexibility, and lower costs, but also increases the risk of interruptions due to connectivity issues or cloud maintenance. To ensure high availability, we propose a hybrid MES that leverages the cloud and local fog nodes as intermediate infrastructure to guarantee an always operational system. In this paper, we specify high availability for MES and review protection objectives that a hybrid MES design needs to fulfill. Subsequently, we propose a novel hybrid MES deployment model that distinguishes the management of transactional and master data to make the best use of high available fog nodes and flexible but cost-efficient cloud resources.