Method and Apparatus for Controlling the Closing of a Plant Application

A system, comprising:

• means programmed to control a closing of a plant application running on a manufacturing execution system (MES) application, the MES application is in communication with an external environment through an application launcher and the MES application allows, at engineering time, to model a certain plant by creating objects belonging to classes in a plant application, which means further programmed to:
• a) provide to a set of the classes, a custom shutdown rule to be customized during the engineering time;
• b) at the engineering time, define, for certain classes belonging to the set of classes, certain shutdown rules with a set of actions to be performed by the MES application;
• c) at run time, by the application launcher, upon receiving an external request of closing the plant application, notify a closing request to the MES application;
• d) at run time, by the MES application, invoke the shutdown rules once for each object of the classes of step b) which have a defined shutdown rule;
• e) at run time, by the MES application, perform the actions defined in the custom shutdown rules invoked;
• f) at run time, by the MES application, close or not close the plant application according to results of the custom shutdown rules invoked in step e);
• and
• g) at run time, by the MES application, notify a production modeler launcher whether the plant application was closed at step f) or not.