Intelligent manufacturing execution systems: A systematic review

The fast-growing demand for effective Industry 4.0-ready systems from academics and practitioners has required an assessment of the state-of-the-art research and implementations in Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). This paper primarily carries out a systematic literature review of the pertinent fields to identify the promising research topics with high potentials for further investigations. In this paper, we adopt a bibliometric and network analysis to create insights that have not been captured before in this domain. It identifies the key institutions, authors and countries that have the highest impact on today’s MES solutions. The trending and pioneering technologies, having high potential to be used in the new generation of MESs, are highlighted for further examinations. We subsequently reviewed the recent surveys related to these technologies and outlined the research limitations, gaps and opportunities that are discussed in the reviewed literature. Inspired by Industry 4.0 maturity steps, five intelligence levels are defined to examine the Industry 4.0 compatibility of the MES models. Besides, this paper briefly reviews the well-known MES solutions and examines their functionalities and intelligence levels. The paper additionally discusses the gaps between the degree of progress in academic and industrial MES solutions and the challenges that impede the adoption of novel MESs by practitioners. Lastly, we propose a conceptual framework, called Intelligent MES (IMES), to illustrate what an industry 4.0-ready MES should contain.