Web-based decision making for collaborative manufacturing

Abstract

This paper presents methodologies of web-based decision making for collaborative manufacturing, including web-based knowledge sharing, distributed process planning, dynamic scheduling, real-time monitoring and remote control, targeting distributed yet collaborative manufacturing environments. The web-based decision making is enabled by a framework that allows users to plan and control manufacturing operations based on information either gathered via the Web or collected from manufacturing devices. The objective of this research is to develop an integrated system for web-based collaborative planning and control, supported by real-time monitoring for dynamic scheduling. Details on the principle of the framework, system architecture, and a proof-of-concept prototype are reported in this paper. An example of remote machining is chosen as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework toward web-based collaborative manufacturing.

Keywords:

• process planning
• scheduling
• monitoring
• machining
• machine control
• web-based systems