Data interoperability for reconfigurable manufacturing process monitoring systems

The ability for manufacturing organisation to be responsive to changing market conditions is imperative for sustainable market competitiveness, and enabling self preservation. Responsive behaviour requires the incorporation of not only robust sustainable manufacturing process chains, but the functional capacity to facilitate reconfiguration and adaption. Manufacturing process chains require process monitoring and condition based monitoring systems to achieve high accuracy manufacturing systems, sustainable production capability, and resource efficiency. The focus of this research is aimed at developing a novel data interoperability architecture to enable the creation of reconfigurable process monitoring systems. To achieve reconfigurable process monitoring capability an information communication paradigm known as agent based design is reviewed, and an emerging agent based standard known as MTConnect is also reviewed. Through this research a novel data interoperability system is developed and defined to enable dynamic data acquisition for reconfigurable process monitoring. A case study is carried out to demonstrate the validity of the architecture to achieve multi data stream unification. This case study demonstrates the ability to actively condition monitor a HURCO VM2 three axis CNC machine dynamically, through the measurement of machine energy requirements and vibration, which are examples of process variables associated with condition based machine monitoring.