Communication method for manufacturing services in a cyber–physical manufacturing cloud

ABSTRACT

The integration of cyber–physical systems and cloud manufacturing has potential to change manufacturing processes for better manufacturing accessibility, agility, and efficiency. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet in order to access and manage manufacturing resources from the cloud. Most of the existing industrial automation protocols utilise Ethernet-based Local Area Network (LAN) and are not designed specifically for communication of manufacturing services over the Internet. MTConnect has been gaining popularity as a standard for monitoring status of the machine tools remotely, but it is designed for communication of read-only monitoring data of machine tools. This paper presents an agent–adapter-based communication method of manufacturing services in a cyber–physical manufacturing cloud (CPMC) to enable manufacturing with various physically connected machines from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. The system uses MTConnect for monitoring and HTTP-based communication method for operating manufacturing resources through the cloud. This integrated approach allows machine tools to communicate with each other over the Internet in manufacturing processes. This paper presents design of the agent–adapter architecture of the integrated communication method of manufacturing services and then discusses the system’s capability of conducting collaborative manufacturing using the communication method. A testbed of the CPMC using the communication method is developed and it is described in detail in this paper. Two empirical studies are presented in order to show the performance of the proposed communication method and CPMC in multiple manufacturing scenarios. It demonstrates excellent feasibility and effectiveness of the communication method and cyber–physical manufacturing cloud for manufacturing with machines in geographically distributed locations.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyber–physical manufacturing cloud
• agent–adapter based communication method
• MTConnect
• HTTP
• collaborative manufacturing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project is supported by NSF Grant CMMI 1551448 entitled ‘EAGER/Cybermanufacturing: Architecture and Protocols for Scalable Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Systems’.