Communication methodology between machine tools using MTConnect protocol

Abstract

Development of smart manufacturing led to a trend of developing autonomous, accessible and cooperative numerical control equipment, which needs a communication subsystem that follows a universal accepted industrial standard. MTConnect has been widely considered as an efficient and sufficient protocol for data collection since its appearance. In this paper, a networked information exchange methodology between computer numerical control systems based on MTConnect technology is proposed, which includes the theoretical architecture of the information exchange module and the implementation of the module based on a CNC systems developed on the TwinCAT platform. A communication system according to the MTConnect protocol for CNC systems was designed, which is able to collect processing data from controllers and transmits those data between controllers by agent and client embedded in the information exchange module. The agent and client which were defined in the protocol were developed through C# language and MTConnect Managed SDK. The proposed methodology was implemented and tested on actual CNC system.