Performance Improvement of a Manufacturing Execution System Designed by Using Cloud Computing Technology in the Optoelectronics Industry

The optoelectronics industry is experiencing improvement in production process technology; keen competition is observed in various fields in this industry. This circumstance has highlighted the importance of not only the companies’ improvements in production technology and yield, but also the integration of production information and the efficiency and accuracy of production systems’ information processing. All of these factors enable companies to make decisions instantly. Because the circulation of production information and responsiveness have become increasingly essential, cloud computing has received increasing emphasis in the information domain. Cloud computing not only increases the speed of information processing, but also reduces the costs of hardware construction and maintenance and the costs of related personnel for companies. This study explored the approach of using cloud computing to improve the analysis and computing of instant data of the manufacturing execution systems (MESs) used in the case of an optoelectronics company. Because of the excessively large amounts of production data in the systems, conventional hardware frameworks tend to experience difficulties processing such data. This study investigated and planned operations in which cloud computing could be incorporated into the current MES framework. The feasibility of the proposed design framework for cloud computing was tested in Windows Azure.