Research On Extended Manufacturing Execution System For Mass Customization And Its Key Technologies

Manufacturing Execution System, located between the upper production planning management and lower industrial control, is a real-time information system oriented for workshop manufacturing management and control. Manufacturing Execution System attracts widespread attention from both the academia and industrial sector once it's been proposed. Recent years have witnessed a lot of achievements on research and application of manufacturing execution system both at home and abroad, but there is still a lack of research concerning manufacturing execution system for mass customization. With the support of national 863 high-tech program, and in order to meet the real needs of business community, this paper investigates the key technologies of extended manufacturing execution system for mass customization.The change of environment is eternal and unpredictable, the survival and development of manufacturing system is depended on its responding ability to changes. With the increasingly diverse product variety and the growing complexity of the manufacturing process, it's becoming more and more difficult for enterprises to complete production tasks solely on its own manufacturing resource in mass customization environment. Dynamically integrating geographically dispersed manufacturing resource to establish a cross-boundary workshop puts forward an important way for manufacturing system to enhance rapid response capacity to win market competition in mass customization environment. This paper discusses the development and changes of workshop manufacturing systems, and points out that the workshop under mass customization environment is based on extensive cooperation with flexible organizational structure and the ability to quickly respond to changes. Operation of such a system requires the support from the extended manufacturing execution system which integrates manufacturing technology, information technology and modern management technology as a whole. For this reason, this paper develops a framework of extended manufacturing execution system for mass customization in accordance with international standards. The extended manufacturing execution systems under the guidance of the proposed formwork focuses on the management and control of production activities involved in the cross-boundary extended workshop, and emphasizes the workshop level production collaboration and resource optimization, it also pays high attention to the information exchange at the scene. The characteristics of the extended manufacturing execution are reflected vertically in the integration of the upper design, management systems with the production equipment and personnel at the bottom, and horizontally in the support of cross-boundary collaborative manufacturing.Under the environment of mass customization, issues such as task changing, scattering of manufacturing resource and small production batch, make it hard to achieve an effective production plan. Similarity is a common form of expression for things. Similarity research boasts significant meanings for transforming individual customized production to batch production. For this reason, a multiple layer workshop production schedule based on process similarity and resource constraints is put forward. The method decomposes the extended workshop production planning process into three phases. The first phase chiefly addresses the issues of logic manufacturing cell reconfiguration. By grouping the tasks in accordance with the similarity of process and resource constraints, it transforms individual customized production to inter-cell batch production. The second phase mainly addresses the issues of production schedule for logic manufacturing cells. The third phase principally investigates the issues of production schedule of outsourcing tasks.Issues addressed in each phases are discussed in details. To solve the problem of cell reconfiguration at the first phase of planning, a logic manufacturing cell reconfiguration method is developed to partitioning the extended work shop into logic manufacturing cells. As for the production schedule at the second phase of planning, a mathematical model with the objective of balancing workload and minimizing the make span is built. As for the assignment of outsourcing tasks at the third phase of planning, a mathematical model with the aim of minimizing the total cost is developed to optimize the task assignment.The prototype of extended manufacturing execution system developed based on this research has been introduced to Chongqing CAFF Automotive Brake Systems Company, and the experimental application indicates a better effect.