## 1 Introduction  
Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), a kind of computerized system, is widely used in manufacturing, to track and document the transformation of raw materials into finished goods. MES has become involved in production planning and control, and it significantly evolved into a more and more powerful system as computing technologies and integration levels become more advanced [1]. MES, together with other information systems, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Product Data Management (PDM), is widely employed by manufacturers to deal with production management and control [2].  
Many manufacturers looking to implement a new MES system will, no doubt, end up considering the industry's some biggest behemoths: SAP [3], Oracle [4], and Siemens [5]. These vendors are clear market share leaders and have well-established product lines. However, all the above MES systems are developed with a centralized architecture, where various data, resources, and functions of its modules are highly coupled with each other. What's more, the data type and processing flow should be figured out and defined before starting programming due to the complexity of the data and business logic [6]. This situation could lead to the development of an oligopoly where once a manufacturer opts for one system, there is almost no opportunity to use others because of the higher replacement cost.  
Nowadays, manufacturers must respond to local and global market shifts as well as to changing regulatory and customer demands more quickly than their competitors. This means manufacturers have to face the music when upgrading their MESs to adapt to new production needs. Their systems' vendors always tend to quote at an astronomical price, since only they can access their own software to customize it. Vendors like SAP have already taken the upgradation and customization issues into consideration, and some Application Program Interfaces (APIs) are released along with the standardized products. But this still brings about some difficulties in customized programming and personalized maintenance in a non-open source system.  
In the meantime, several strategies for manufacturing have been developed, such as Industry 4.0 in Germany, Industrial Internet in the USA, and Made in China 2025 in China [7]. These initiatives encourage the applications of New Generation of Information Technologies (NGITs) [8] in manufacturing, such as big data, edge computing, artificial intelligence, and so on. NGITs drive manufacturing to become more and more flat and interconnected. More participants and roles are involved in the same production process than ever, which makes the interconnection of software and sharing of data more and more important. In terms of MES, its goal has become collaborative control all over the industry chain instead of accomplishing the internal planning or scheduling inside an enterprise or a workshop. Objectively, these changes have driven the evolution of data governance from centralized to distributed and decentralized.  
It is believed that the MES in the future will take over the manufacturing ecosystem, which is not limited to its original definition. It will combine with the information systems of ERP, CRM, and others, to extend more customized functions. Also, a future MES must have the microservice-based feature to fit in the dispersion of data and use the lightweight and flexible architecture to adapt to the more complex functions in discrete manufacturing. In other words, embedded Apps in the future will not need to be downloaded and installed [9]. Users will only need to Open, Use, Share, and Close. As a consequence, the characteristics of next-generation MES can be summarized as follows.