An Approach for Designing and Developing Microservices-enabled Manufacturing Operations Management in Greenfield Environments

Abstract

Microservices are a special type of service-oriented architecture that promises flexibility through the encapsulation of functionality and lose coupling. With a growing need for responsiveness of manufacturing systems driven by customer expectation, competition, and regulatory changes, the microservice architecture is highly attractive for Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solutions. Manufacturing enterprises that have a traditional MOM solution as a monolithic system in place can transition to microservices architecture through reverse engineering their existing solution. This is not possible in a greenfield environment where the entire manufacturing system is built from scratch. In this paper, we present an approach for designing and developing a microservices-enabled MOM solution for greenfield environments. The approach incorporates a parallel design and development of the microservice addressing the functional needs of the MOM solution and equipment emulators that are based on industry standards and facilitate testing the entire solution before the real equipment is delivered. We evaluate the approach through a case study in which we developed a microservices-enabled MOM solution for a small-scale battery manufacturing line. We report that the ISA95 standard provides a good guideline for microservice MOM solutions, though the underlying data model needed to be modified to cover our case. The developed instantiation also shows that microservices MOM can address new requirements in a flexible way. However, this does not come without cost as their integration and management require additional effort in comparison to monolithic architectures.