Common-HMI for the monitoring of heterogeneous equipment

Rapid changes in the global economic environment and advancement of converging technology have been accelerating the digitalization of the manufacturing industry. In particular, digitalization is being magnified as one of the major contributors for manufacturers to secure competitive edge — such as better productivity and reduction of transaction cost — as well as the main culprit of gaps in growth. It is drastically changing the paradigm of business management. The manufacturing industry has been striving to cope with these changes by adopting some types of production management systems but having difficulties about how to collect 4M (Machine, man, materials and manufacturing resources) data effectively and how to integrate dispersed information systems following the expansion of production lines as well as the cost of adopting a new system. As the essential components of automation, HMI (Human machine interface) is designed to monitor the operation of equipment and collects the shop floor information. HMI relies heavily on equipment and should be different for different manufacturers as well as within same manufacture; thus inevitably imposing a heavy burden on HMI developers. This paper introduces a common-HMI that is capable of collecting data for heterogeneous equipment in the shop floor and presenting clear, visual information to the user. The common-HMI is reusable for different types of production equipment and can be deployed without any modifications; it is expected to save on system adoption cost and the proposed method can facilitates system expansion and maintenance effort allowing the expansion of the production line. It has proven its outstanding performance including reusability and reduction of system adoption cost in a pilot study wherein it was used for two different types of equipment.