A study on a general cyber machine tools monitoring system in smart factories

The massive data produced in real manufacturing processes provides a micro observation mechanism for managers and producers, which helps to analyze and grasp the manufacturing details, to form a macro decision-making mechanism, and finally to improve the manufacturing quality and production efficiency. This paper deeply investigates the real-time acquisition method of machine tool processing data and presents a general method of data analysis in different actual application scenarios to solve the general problem of insufficient and inappropriate utilization of machine tools. A framework of general machine tool monitoring system with four layers is proposed and several key stumbling blocks are researched, such as heterogeneous machine data acquisition, data analysis, and related application. These achievements are applied in a general cyber machine tools monitoring system based on MTConnect, which has greatly improved the utilization of machine tools and become a valuable unit in the framework of intelligent manufacturing and smart factory.