Overview

The demands made of a modern MES system mean that these systems must be given an appropriate structure. Island solutions or even classic PDA systems are biased towards being able to run several monolithic software modules in parallel on one integration platform. Users have always wanted these monolithic modules to be able to communicate with each other. Unfortunately the reality was often different, such as, for example, the fact that in one earlier PDA system the shift performance of the machine and the number of parts produced for that operation had to be input in two separate dialogs at the end of the shift.

One of the most important reasons for these problems was the demand of the market for a standard software system. Instead of requiring individual programming and thereby making it necessary to carry out a corresponding analysis of requirements, these standard products promised the user a fast and inexpensive way to reach his goal. The limits of these solutions are easy to see from the example cited: mutual integration of these products only occurred at precisely the place where it was explicitly planned. Should this integration not have originally been deemed necessary, it would not then be available when actually needed and would thus have to be purchased later on, and in some cases at considerable expense.

In recent years manufacturers of MES solutions have been engaged very intensively on breaking through the limits of existing software architectures. The keywords "process mapping", "business logic" and "process...