The production's automation process in the industrial world from the past to the future. Analysis of the industry's evolution, with a focus on the Manufacturing Execution System and on the development of a mobile cross-platform MES application

This thesis aims to summarize, from a computer scientist point of view, the evolution of the automation process in the industrial production, focusing on the last 20 years technologies and methodologies applied in the industrial scope, taking as model the standard ANSI/ISA-95 which introduces the automation pyramid that allows to see the entire supply chain in a hierarchical way. The central topic of this work, on which we are going to pay particular attention, is the Manufacturing Execution System, which is the system that creates the link between the marketing/business part of the factory (ERP) and its on-field production part; it allows to the employees to improve the performances of the production, not only increasing the automation of the process, but also providing to the humans some real-time statistics with the goal to maximize the usage of the factory's resources. In the scope of the MES, we are going to take a look also at its evolution in the time, with the advent of new technologies. We are going to briefly analyse also the so-called Industry 4.0 which is going to revolutionize the classical centralized approach of the industry, creating a completely virtualized factory composed by intelligent elements. The entire study of the industrial world, will be accompanied by an analysis of the human's figure in a world that is more and more composed by machines, to prove that the man still remains at the center of the process, also if the automation rate of the factory is constantly increasing. To make less abstract the concepts explained, an example of my direct working experience on a MES will be provided. The MES name is AquiWeb, developed by the French software house Astrée Software. This working experience will be detailed, talking about the development of a mobile MES application, using a cross-platform approach for iOS and Android. Since several years, the cross-platform development is catching on, because of its obviously economical and practical advantages; so it will be presented the analysis of the study conducted on the cross-platform development, and on the choice of the best framework that suits this particular case, but made evaluating objective criteria.