MTConnect-based Cyber-Physical Machine Tool: a case study

Recent advancements in Information and Communication Technology have shown immense potential of advancing current CNC machine tools to Cyber-Physical Machine Tools (CPMT). CPMT deeply integrates machine tool and machining processes with computation and networking, thus becoming more intelligent, interconnected and autonomous. However, challenges of data communication and management remain. This is due to the diversity of manufacturing devices, sensors used and hence the delivery of data types. This paper presents an MTConnect-based CPMT that allows diverse types of real-time manufacturing data to be effectively and efficiently collected and managed, to enable advanced human-machine interactions and cloud-based decision-making supports in CPMT.