No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

MTConnect is becoming a widely accepted Internet communication standard for factory automation. It is being used for collecting and analyzing data of manufacturing machines and monitoring them over the Internet. This paper describes an implementation of MTConnect RESTful protocol for monitoring networked open-source RepRap based 3D printers in a Cyber Physical Manufacturing Cloud. The open source RepRap based 3D printers are gaining popularity over past few years because of cheaper price, easy-to-use and self-replicating features. The implementation includes establishing communication with the 3D printer, collecting and transmitting status data using MTConnect Adapter developed in a Raspberry Pi and publishing the data in a standard XML format via MTConnect Agent over the Internet. We also describe detailed design of appropriate MTConnect standard dataitems and discuss how to use them to implement probe, current and sample operations of MTConnect Internet communication protocol for factory automation. The performance of the implemented system is evaluated and the results demonstrate excellent feasibility of real-time manufacturing process monitoring of networked open-source 3D printers with MTConnect over the Internet in a Cyber Physical Manufacturing Cloud.

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.