Industrial and Systems Engineering
Graduate Seminar Series

BENCHMARKING VS.NET FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEM

Amit Rege
Master of Science Candidate
Industrial and System Engineering
Rochester Institute of Technology

Date: Thursday, October 28, 2004
Time: 1:00pm
Location: Room 09-1149

The focus of this thesis is to show the utility of Microsoft's .NET framework in developing and implementing a MES system. The manufacturing environment today, more than ever, is working towards achieving better yields, productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction. Companies such as DELL are rapidly outgrowing their competition due to better management of their product lifecycles. The time between receiving a new order to the time the final product is shipped is getting shorter by the day. Historically, business management applications such as Enterprise Resourse Planning (ERP) systems and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have been implemented without too much importance given to the operational and shop floor needs. The fact is that these business systems can be successful only when they are properly integrated with real-time data from the shop floor, which is the core to the manufacturing set-up. A Manufacturing Execution System or a MES is this link between the shop floor and the top floor. The aim of this applied research is to design a MES using VS.NET to control the working of a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) namely CAMCELL. The architecture used for the MES will then be gauged against an MES implementation done previously using a Siemems' PC-based automation technology and Visual FoxPro. This study will integrate the Siemens' technology with the .NET framework to enchance the resulting MES efficiency. The study will demonstrate how the data stored in a high level ERP database can be converted into useful information for the control layer for process control and also how real-time information gathered from the control layer can be filtered into useful information up to the ERP layer to facilitate the decision making process. VS.NET user interface screens will be proposed to support these activities. The performance of the proposed architecture will be compared to that from previous studies, thus benchmarking VS.NET for the implementation of the MES.

Thesis Committee:
Dr. Sudhakar R. Paidy (Chair), Industrial & Systems Engineering
Dr. James Taylor, Industrial & Systems Engineering

Questions?
Contact Dr. Michael Kuhl at 475-2134 or mekeie@rit.edu