Towards Manufacturing Execution Systems for the food and beverage packaging industry

In this paper, we describe the issues faced in bringing advanced supervisory and control concepts in the fragmented food and beverage packaging industry. Although packaging equipment manufacturers must cope with tight cost constraints, heterogenous machines, and customers' requests for specialized features, we take the position that time is ready for bringing more advanced features such as automated production flow and full production supervision even in this domain of consumer oriented and highly personalized products. Manufacturing Execution Systems, which have been introduced with success in other manufacturing areas, can be applied in food and beverage packaging taking advantage from recently proposed standards. This effort requires to supplement the software base of existing machines with an interface layer ensuring interoperability according to the existing standards. By consolidating these standards and adopting good design practices, flexible integration, supervision and control of packaging lines can be obtained.