A RFID-enabled MES for real-time pharmaceutical manufacturing supervision

Pharmaceutical manufacturing is legally bound and supervised by government. Paper-based and manual pharmaceutical manufacturing systems are time-consuming, manpower-wasting, high-quality-cost and error-prone. This paper presents a Manufacturing Execution System (MES) to control production process on the shop floor. Some new advanced technologies, such as RFID, wireless manufacturing, real-time data collecting, real-time work-in-process (WIP) tracking and tracing methodology, are integrated in the MES. A wireless device named IDT (Intelligent Data Terminal) by utilizing 433MHz communication mode is deployed on the shop floor, which enables MES to perform real-time production control. Based on this real-time MES, real-time supervision can be adopted and adapted for FDA (Food and Drug Administration). This paper also provides a Web-Access monitoring on workshops and a Data-Transmission supervision on products. A case study is depicted to show the effectiveness of MES for pharmaceutical manufacturing as well as the advantages of real-time supervision for FDA.