About Adopting Event Processing in Manufacturing

Today's manufacturing enterprises are facing increasing pressure due to globalization, uncertainties, and strict regulations, among others. To cope with aforesaid challenges, manufacturing enterprises need to enhance their monitoring and control of enterprise processes (i.e., business processes and associated manufacturing processes) within and across different enterprise levels. This results in achieving higher degree of transparency, flexibility and adaptability. Enterprise integration (EI) within and across different enterprise levels can be considered as a building block towards realizing the aforementioned goals. Further, this building block can be exploited in realizing a real-time enterprise (RTE), which is based on the introduction of sense-and-respond and learn-and-adapt concepts into enterprise processes [1]. Lately, event processing and event-driven architectures (EDA) are gaining more attention especially related to business processes to accomplish sense-and-respond [2]. For instance, fraud detection during billing process [3] and fraud mobile call detection [4]. Similarly, research has carried out work in the area of business activity monitoring (BAM) based on event processing [5]. In contrast to financial sector, event processing is far away from adoption in manufacturing enterprises. However, it could be vital to incorporate manufacturing processes along with the corresponding business processes to reap the rich benefits of event processing. Now, attempts are been made to realize event processing in manufacturing. For example, a stream processing solution named public infrastructure for processing and exploring streams (PIPES) has been integrated with a manufacturing execution system (MES) named i-Plant [6]. The solution exploits continuous query processing in factory automation. In the context of manufacturing enterprises, research has been carried out at Information Systems Institute for enabling EI, and enhancing online monitoring and control of enterprise processes [7], [8]. A framework based on an EDA has been developed constituting various components as illustrated in Figure 1. Data collection engine is employed for acquisition of real-time process data from physical resources available on shop floor. A level above, data aggregation engine is in charge of integrating real-time process data with corresponding transactional data from enterprise applications (e.g., ERP system). In addition, integrated data is utilized to create and administer online tracking objects by tracking object manager of data aggregation engine [9]. IEC 62265-3 regards tracking as an " activity of recording attributes of resources and products through all steps of instantiation, use, changes