Development of machine tool communication method and its edge middleware for cyber-physical manufacturing systems

Abstract

ABSTRACT By enabling the fusion of cyber and physical world, Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) have emerged as a key technology of the fourth industrial revolution – Industry 4.0. One of the major challenges for developing manufacturing CPSs is establishing communication between physical resources and Internet/cloud-hosted applications. Recently, MTConnect has become a widely popular communication method for monitoring machine tools in cyber manufacturing. However, it does not allow remote operations of machine tools over the Internet, which is essential in many manufacturing CPSs. This paper presents an Internet-scale service-oriented communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm), which provides capabilities of both monitoring and operating heterogeneous machine tools over the Internet. MTComm allows machine tools to exchange manufacturing services and associated information in XML format through RESTful web services. This paper describes design and development of MTComm components, ontology, and methodology of data acquisition and direct operation through five types of services. To reduce communication latency and improve performance, three optimization strategies were developed and used in an edge-based middleware. Experiments were conducted in a testbed with five machines at different stages of MTComm development and results demonstrated excellent feasibility for efficiently monitoring and operating heterogeneous machine tools in a scalable cyber-physical manufacturing environment.