Development of communications protocols between manufacturing execution system and production equipment

Information coordination among business planning, MES (manufacturing execution system), and equipment controllers is significant for manufacturers. Because production information systems are often constructed in a multi-vendor environment, a large amount of man-hours has been required to develop connection functions corresponding to various combinations of vendors. In order to solve this problem, we have constructed a standard model by a use case analysis of manufacturing operations management in the Japanese standardization committee MESX (MES on XML) joint project. By this model, we have defined XML communications protocols for production information systems. This paper focuses on the protocols between the MES layer and the equipment control layer, and reports on features and effects.