This paper is standing on the recent viewpoint originated from relevant industrial practices that well or-ganized tracing, representing and feedback(TRF) mechanism of material-flow information is crucial for system utility and usability of manufacturing execution systems(MES), essentially, for activities on the side of multi-level decision making and optimization mainly in the planning and scheduling. In this paper, we investigate a key issue emphasized on a route of multi-level information evolution on the side of large-scale feedback, where material-flow states could evolve from the measuring data(local states) to networked event-type information cells(global states) and consequently to the key performance indicators(KPI) type information(gross states). Importantly, with adapta-bilities to frequent structural dynamics residing in running material flows, this evolving route should be modeled as a suit of sophisticated mechanism for large-scale dynamic states tracking and representing so as to upgrade accu-racy and usability of the feedback information in MES. To clarify inherent complexities of this evolving route, the investigated issue is demonstrated from extended process systems engineering(PSE) point of view, and the TRF principles of the multi-level feedback information(states) are highlighted under the multi-scale methodology. As the main contribution, a novel mechanism called TRF modeling mechanism is introduced.
Refinery system, a typical example of process systems, is presented as complex network in this paper. The topology of this system is described by task-resource network and modeled as directed and weighted graph, in which nodes represent various tasks and edges denote the resources exchanged among tasks. Using the properties of node degree distribution, strength distribution and other weighted quantities, we demonstrate the heterogeneity of the network and point out the relation between structural characters of vertices and the functionality of correspond- ing tasks. The above phenomena indicate that the design requirements and principles of production process contrib- ute to the heterogeneous features of the network. Besides, betweenness centrality of nodes can be used as an impor- tance indicator to provide additional information for decision making. The correlations between structure and weighted properties are investigated to further address the influence brought by production schemes in system con- nectivity patterns. Cascading failures model is employed to analyze the robustness of the network when targeted at- tack happens. Two capacity assignment strategies are compared in order to improve the robustness of the network at certain cost. The refinery system displays more reliable behavior when the protecting strategy considers heteroge- neous properties. This phenomenon further implies the structure-activity relationship of the refinery system and provides insightful suggestions for process system design. The results also indicate that robustness analysis is a _promising applicat!on of methodologies from complex networks to process system engineering..
