An enabling digital foundation towards smart machining

Abstract

Today's major challenges for manufacturing companies in the aerospace and automotive industries are clear: global cooperation with multiple supply chain partners, production optimization, management and tracking of information so as to meet new requirements in terms of traceability, security and sustainability. The need for a data exchange standard that allows disparate entities and their associated devices in a manufacturing system to share data seamlessly is clearly obvious. And the first expected impact is the ‘next generation’ smart controller that could really enable an intelligent machining process based on real-time monitoring and diagnosis, self-learning decision and adaptive optimization. The four-year project titled FoFdation envisions a ‘Digital and Smart Factory’ architecture and implementation. This has the potential to achieve significant benefits in earlier visibility of manufacturing issues, faster production ramp-up time, faster time to volume production and subsequently shorter time to market, reduced manufacturing costs and improved product quality, as well as sustainability objectives like low energy consumption and waste reduction. The present paper describes the on-going work with specific focus on the definition and implementation of the FoFdation Smart Machine Controller (SMC) in an adaptable architecture that satisfies both commercial and open source CNC controllers. It highlights the project's end use validation framework as well as sets a strong Manufacturing Information System foundation on which process optimization and control as well as sustainable practices can be based. It presents the general vision of the target solution for the SMC developed in the FoFdation project. It is based on efforts past and present both by academia and industry in various capacities and proposes tentative implementations based on the STEP-NC standard to define the machine controller of the future.