Research On Collaborative Manufacturing Information Environment

Collaboration between manufacturing cells is still a hard problem to solve in discrete manufacturing industry. At present machines just play the role of tools, accepting instructions passively and acting passively. If machines can ask for jobs actively and dispatch jobs automatically, this will be helpful to the flexibility and efficiency of discrete manufacturing.By comparing the differences between manufacturing system based on general NC(Numeric Control) machines and manufacturing system based on STEP-NC machines, this paper proposed a collaborative manufacturing conception. To realize the information environment supporting collaborative manufacturing, there are two basic problems that must be solved first. One is the presentation of manufacturing resources and product, the other is information exchange among heterogeneous CNC systems or manufacturing cells.Feature-oriented information model of manufacturing resource and product is the infrastructure of collaborative manufacturing system. The information model is mainly depended on the standardization made by relative organizations. In this paper, ISO STEP standard is used, both the automated and manual process of product modeling is given out. Resource modeling is based on ISO 15531 standard and some related standards, a resource information model is presented and feature models about machine tools and cutting tools are given out as well.By combining both Web Services and Multi-Agent System technologies, a dynamic iterative MAS architecture is proposed to solve information exchange problem between heterogeneous systems in MAS. The agent structure is also given out. And WSFL(Web Services Flow Language) is expected to be applied to define the frequent working flows to improve the efficiency of the MAS.Finally, A relational database model is given out based on the feature-oriented information model of product and resource. And An experiment environment supporting collaborative manufacturing among heterogeneous manufacturing cells is preliminary built based on Web Services and Java. The experiment environment has the advantages of platform-independent, language-independent, loose coupled, modularity and good extensibility.