Development of holonic manufacturing execution systems

Today, most semiconductor manufacturing companies utilize Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) (MacDonald, 1993; Samanish, 1993; Nguyen, 1996; Scatt, 1996; MESA, 1997) to deliver information to optimize production activities from order booking through design, production, and marketing to realize the agile manufacturing enterprise. The MES market is composed of several vendors providing an integrated suite of application products (called an integrated MES), and 200, or so, vendors offering individual point solutions (Scott, 1996). An integrated MES may have many advantages, such as a single-logic database, rich functionality, well-integrated applications, and a single model of factories, products, and manufacturing processes. However, integrated MES’s are sometimes regarded as monolithic, insufficiently configurable, and difficult to modify. Point solutions can offer best-in-class capabilities for a particular function (such as cell controller, work-in-process (WIP) tracking, statistical process control, scheduling, etc.); the end result is multiple databases, multiple models, and integration nightmares plus maintenance costs (McGehee, et al. 1994; Kadar et al., 1998). In order to solve the problem of the dichotomy between the integrated MES and point solutions, the concept of the integratable MES has been proposed (Scott, 1996). With the integratable MES, each application can be both a selfsufficient point solution, and can be integrated into a larger suite of products. Therefore, the integratable MES offers an open, modularized, configurable, distributed, and collaborative environment such that rapid implementation, complexity reducing, agility, cost-effective integration, easiness of use, and ownership cost reducing may be achieved (McGehee et al., 1994; Kadar et al., 1998). McGehee et al. (1994) presented the Texas Instruments Microelectronics Manufacturing Science and Technology (MMST) CIM System Framework, which was based on open-distributed system and object technologies. This re-