Design and Implementation of Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud Using MTConnect

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems are gaining momentum in the domain of manufacturing. Cloud Manufacturing is also revolutionizing the manufacturing world. However, although there exist numerous physical manufacturing machines which are network-ready, very few of them are operated in a networked environment due to lack of scalability of existing cyber-physical systems. Combining the features offered by cloud manufacturing and cyber-physical systems, we develop a service-oriented architecture of scalable cyber-physical manufacturing cloud with MTConnect. A testbed of cyber-physical manufacturing cloud is being developed based on the above scalable architecture. In this system, manufacturing machines and their capabilities virtualized in a cyber-physical cloud. Manufacturing operations are represented as web services so that they are accessible across the Internet. Performance of the testbed of our cyber-physical manufacturing cloud with MTConnect is evaluated and test results show that our system achieves excellent service performance of manufacturing operations across Internet.

Defining a Digital Twin-based Cyber-Physical Production System for autonomous manufacturing in smart shop floors

“…The combination of private database and public database indicates the trend of the cloud-based distributed data storage and computing (Ding et al 2018). Besides, the protocols for smart object access such as MTConnect (Liu et al 2016), AutomationML (Schroeder et al 2016) and OPC UA need to be configured.…”

Standards for Smart Manufacturing: A review

“…MTConnect-based system monitoring is also used for retrieving in-process parts data to quickly generate machining quality reports [30]. Previous research also demonstrated a much wider application of MTConnect towards smart manufacturing, such as sustainable machining [31], machining simulation [32], cloud manufacturing [33], intelligent maintenance [34], and cyber-physical machine tools [35].…”

Real-time vision-based multiple object tracking of a production process: Industrial digital twin case study

“…16 MTConnect and OPC-Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) are two communication protocols specifically designed for industrial automation. 17,18 MTConnect has been designed towards the Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine shop with predefined data structures and rules whereas OPC-UA provides a more open user-defined variable structure which results in a wider scope of implementation. 19 OPC-UA has the capability to both receive and send information where MTConnect can only monitor.…”