The New Open Communication Standard MTConnect Brings Enthusiasm into the Discussion about the Machine Communication Standards for ‘Industry 4.0’ Concepts
Nothing will be the same in the industrial manufacturing companies of the future. The intelligent parts of the future will find their optimum way through the manufacturing process without any outside help. This autonomous technosphere is only possible if people, products, machines, and tools communicate closely along the production chain. The software systems, especially the Manufacturing Execution Systems such as GUARDUS MES of GUARDUS Solutions AG from Ulm will play an important part in this communication. They represent the adhesion between the automated level and the ERP system and are responsible for the software-based interaction of all the participants to the production process. This task can only be performed with a machine communication which does not have any kind of language barriers, but this is exactly the aspect that is rather chaotic in the ‘Industry 4.0’ vision. Until now, there have been no well-established standards that could guarantee a seamless data flow from and between the production equipment of various manufacturers. Still, we can now see the first rays of hope. The recently presented open communication standard “MTConnect” of the US Association for Manufacturing Technology (AMT) could be a building stone for the long-awaited solution required by the market. “At the moment, we can observe that the international manufacturers of production equipment are adopting the new interface technology to extend the communication capability of their devices. Depending on the direction of this development, a standard could finally become accepted that can be implemented easily and efficiently. And in the context of the international MES standardisation and market penetration, this would be a real step forwards in the future of the ‘Industry 4.0’”, says Andreas Kirsch, leader of the DIN work group MES and convenor of the ISO work group WG9 for Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM), as well as member of the managing board of GUARDUS Solutions AG.
MTConnect is an open, unlicensed communication standard with a convincing characteristic: simplicity. Contrary to the request-oriented, proprietary interfaces for machine communication that are available on the market, MTConnect works unidirectionally. Once this has been implemented and switched on, the machine continuously “twitters” its process parameters to its “followers” via HTTP”. These are, for example, the Manufacturing Execution Systems, which filter the information that is relevant for them and save it in an integrated MES database. This information refers to quantities, times, status, as well as process data such as temperature, power input, or speed of operation. “This information can be used for the online monitoring of the process stability as well as for the saving and analyses of line charts”, says Kirsch. An eloquent example is the Total Preventive Maintenance in the context of the maintenance planning via a MES. During the total preventive maintenance, the MES agents monitor the process parameters of the machines regarding the stress of certain critical machine parts. “Regardless of whether we are speaking about ‘Industry 4.0’ or individual automated production lines, when a machine breaks down because of erroneously planned maintenance intervals, the prejudice is enormous. However, if data about the machine stress, such as operating hours or critical loads are available online, the maintenance intervals can be dynamically adjusted”, explains Kirsch.
The Wide Overview
If a machine communication standard became widely adopted because of its efficiency and simplicity, the MESs would be better able to provide all the data connections between people, products, machines, tools, and processes in an integrated database. The advantage: detailed real-time evaluations of the quality and productivity in the production process. “A seamless data flow between the equipment and IT level offers a wide range of performance indicators which not only inform about the unit processing time, utilisation efficiency, scrap rates, or quality costs, but also highlight the use of resources and energy, the process stability, and machine stress. Thus, the production management, quality management, and controlling will constantly receive the current data situation and thus they will be able to take the corrective and improving measures in real-time”, says Andreas Kirsch. The fact that this information basis already exists now for the users of the GUARDUS MES is due to the intelligent integration concept of the system. An international standard based, for example, on the MTConnect could obviously accelerate and simplify the structure and the upgrades of this knowledge pool in the future.
