Advanced MTConnect Asset Management

The universal factory floor communications protocol MTConnect allows the exchange of information between shop floor equipment and software applications. Data from shop floor devices is collected by a piece of software called adapter. The adapter sends the data to a local webserver called agent, which associates the data with an information model and makes machine data available to clients in uniform MTConnect representations. The standardized MTConnect schema definition serves as a structure for modeling devices, independent components of the devices and device’s design characteristics. Additional equipment associated with the manufacturing process that is not a component of a device can be modeled as an MTConnect asset. Examples of assets are objects like cutting tools, workholding systems, parts and fixtures. Apart from the fact that currently only few MTConnect adapters available on the market provide asset data, state of the art NC controllers only manage rudimentary data regarding assets such as cutting tools or workholding systems. To tackle this problem the paper describes a network architecture for Asset Management based on the MTConnect standard and a piece of software called Asset Broker, distributing assets to multiple Machine Agents and allowing for detailed asset updates with regard to process information. The Asset Broker thereby closes the gap between MTConnect assets and current machine tools poor asset management capabilities and enables the synchronization of updated asset information between Machine Agents and software applications such as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Tool Management Software (TMS) or Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP). Introduction Initiatives like Industrie 4.0 (I4.0) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) force the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in manufacturing. One key task is machine data acquisition from a diverse set of industrial equipment on the shop floor. Therefore uniform, robust communications are part of the necessary infrastructure for modern manufacturing systems. MTConnect, as an open, royalty-free standard, allows great interoperability between both devices and software applications and is getting more important in the manufacturing domain. With MTConnect machine tools provide a unique data model of their physical structure and the data items they offer. This allows the monitoring of machine tool’s process states and performing data analytics based on standardized software applications. Besides the components and data items of machine tools, a manufacturing process is related to other objects that are not a component of a machine, but also need to be addressed by the MTConnect standard, because they contain or provide viable process information. These objects can be cutting tools, workpieces (parts), NC-programs, a work order or other objects that can be created, transformed or removed within the process. To allow generating and managing such complex data models at runtime, MTConnect assets were introduced. As a consequence MTConnect assets can also change their data structure in the XML (Extensible Markup Language) representation and therefore may offer a good framework for future expansions and developments within the MTConnect standard. Several machine tool producers already offer an MTConnect adapter (e.g. Mazak or DMG [1]), but most of them only allow data access for the device and do not support MTConnect assets. Other adapters like the Okuma MTConnect adapter [2] already generate and provide cutting tool assets for agents, but lack the ability to import those assets from agents and thus may lose information added from other sources to the assets. To tackle this problem, the paper presents an approach for advanced MTConnect Asset Management. Therefore an MTConnect Asset Broker is presented which could be used for MTConnect based monitoring of manufacturing equipment and thereby allows for managing and updating assets with process data. The first part of the paper gives a general overview of MTConnect and MTConnect assets. In the second section the MTConnect Asset Management is specified in detail. After that an MTConnect Cutting Tool Broker, which has specialized functionality for cutting tools, is described as a sample application. In the last section we give an outlook to future steps.