A Component-Based Application Framework for Manufacturing

This paper describes the design and realization of a component- based application framework to develop Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are a recently defined category of industrial software for the plant floor/manufacturing environment. The overall goal has been to enable the development of MES software systems by composition and extensions of prefabricated building blocks. The framework-based development of MES applications guarantees significant reduction in development time and cost by increased software quality. The framework is grounded on two supplementing approaches – on the one side, an event- and constraint-based modelling approach is used to represent equipment states and production workflow and, on the other side, object-oriented and component-based software technology have been used as the underlying realization concepts. The framework has been realized in Microsoft’s new C# programming language and .NET Framework. 1 Keywords: application frameworks, component-based software development, .NET Framework, C# language, manufacturing execution systems, workflow modelling.