Review paper 1 | ML Portfolio

Intelligent Manufacturing Execution Systems - A systematic review

The fast-growing demand for effective Industry 4.0-ready systems requires an assessment of the existing research works and industrial implementations of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES).

This work presents a literature review on the pertinent fields in MESs with the objective of identifying promising research topics with high potential for further investigations. A bibliometric and network analysis method was adopted in this work to create and capture insights that have not be captured before in this domain.

PROJECT INFO

PRODUCT

A journal paper - Review Article

TIMELINE

7 Months

ROLE

Writing Draft

FIRST AUTHOUR

Ardeshir Shojaeinasab
PhD Student
Advanced Control and Intelligent Systems Lab

University of Victoria.
ardeshir@uvic.ca

Other contributors

T. Charter - toddch@uvic.ca
M. Jalayer - masoudjalayer@uvic.ca
M. Khadivi - mazy1996@uvic.ca
N. Raiyani
M. Yaghoubi - marjanyaghoubi@uvic.ca
H.Najjaran - najjaran@uvic.ca

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Contributions of this work

This paper presents a systematic review, that focuses on identifying promising research areas in manufacturing execution systems with high potentials for research.
It adopts a bibliometric and network analysis approach to identify the key institutions, authors and countries that have the highest impact on today’s MES solutions. The trending and pioneering technologies that have high potential to be used in the new generation of MESs are highlighted for further examinations
This work reviews the recent surveys related to MES technologies and outlined the research limitations, gaps and opportunities discussed in the reviewed literatures.
Inspired by Industry 4.0 maturity steps, five intelligence levels; Digitalization, Visibility, Transparency, Prediction and Adaptability are defined to examine the Industry 4.0 compatibility of the MES models.
In addition, this paper briefly reviews the well-known MES solutions and examines their functionalities and intelligence levels. It also finds and highlights the gaps between the degree of progress in academic and industrial MES solutions and the challenges that impede the adoption of novel MESs by practitioners.
Lastly, we propose a conceptual framework, called Intelligent MES (IMES), to illustrate what an industry 4.0-ready MES should contain. The results of this literature review influenced the areas of research of every team member with the collective goal to develop an industry 4.0 ready MES solution.

Publication Sections Summary

Section 1 introduces the concept of MES, discusses the need for MES in relation to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems using the automation pyramid. The main functionalities of MES, how they differ from ERP systems and how they enable smart manufacturing were also discussed briefly. The integration of Artificial Intelligence with MES and the characteristics of MES for Industry 4.0 were shown.
The research methodology and research questions were explained in section 2.
The detailed graph and bibliometric analysis were carried out in Sections 3,4. This results from these analysis were used to identify the influential authors, clusters, and research trends in MES field.
Having identified the current trends, the most recent MES surveys were reviewed in Section 5 to search for the common trends and gaps .
Section 6 presents the main functionalities of MES and introduces five intelligent levels. Then it categorizes the proposed solutions in literature into these levels and functionalities to identify the research gaps.
The existing ready-to-use novel MES solutions, their features and shortcomings were discussed in Section 7 while pointing out some obstacles that the practitioners face towards adopting new MESs.
In order to provide a concept of a smart and integrated MES that can alleviate the obstacles in industry 4.0 realization, we introduce a model, Intelligent Manufacturing Execution Systems (IMES), in Section 8.
We conclude this paper in Section 9 with a discussion on the research gaps, limitations, and the future of MESs.