Reusable architecture variants for customer-specific automation solutions

Manufacturing execution systems (MES) are key elements of industrial automation systems. MES can be deployed at different levels of scale from a single site or plant to a company with globally distributed production sites all over the world. Establishing or extending an MES is a complex process, which requires taking the already existing software and system architecture into account in addition to the desired MES features. We developed an approach and an associated tool to support the process of creating offers for customer-specific MES solutions based on a vendor-specific automation platform. We define architecture variants for selecting a specific MES feature set and for supporting different MES expansion stages. Additionally, we provide an architecture modeling approach to explore the integration with existing software and system infrastructures. The approach has been applied at the STIWA Group, a vendor of MES for industrial production lines.