Towards model-integrated service-oriented manufacturing execution system

The current need for product variation inquires a higher orchestration effort in production to be able to produce at the lowest cost per unit. However, flexibility and low cost per unit are conflicting goals. To deal with this challenge, new types of manufacturing systems have been proposed with the rise of information technologies in the area of discrete manufacturing such as Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS). Still, high efforts are necessary to implement configuration changes in such systems, which we aim to overcome with a modular Manufacturing Execution System (MES), where functionalities are grouped as reusable blocks provided by a dedicated library. This position paper presents a conceptual framework for modeling MES in terms of the Systems Modeling Language (SysML). The overall goal is to define a model-integrated MES as generic solution in order to ease reconfiguration efforts. By the term model-integrated we mean that models are not only used for the design of MES but also during operation. In this paper, we evaluate if it is possible to represent MES by SysML with a use case of modeling a demonstrator manufacturing cell, which utilizes OPC UA as communication protocol for machine connection as well as for providing a service-oriented layer as connection point for the MES.