STEP-compliant CNC Systems, Present and Future Directions

In the early twenty-first century, manufacturing companies face increased productivity pressures and requirements for greater product variability. One of their biggest challenges is to make, while cooperating with multiple design and supply chain partners, the first part “correct and fast”. This requirement leads to the need for a data exchange standard that allows disparate entities and their associated devices in a manufacturing system to share data seamlessly in a common format. This will enable, in the future digital factory foundation, the development and use of a “Smart and Ubiquitous NC machining workstation” that represents the brain and knowledge repository of the manufacturing system, based on high bandwidth information, real-time networking, and the ability to be adaptive (self-learning and flexible). The foundation of the Smart NC Machining Workstation is a STEP-compliant NC system connected to a Manufacturing Information Pipeline and distributed hubs for data acquisition from compliant devices as well as for agent-based communication with legacy data. This structure will support a self-learning decision controller providing intelligent science-based algorithms for automatic and optimised tool-path generation and on-line corrective software, preventive maintenance, hardware diagnostics based on statistical process control. Standardisation of the whole process will be achieved through the use of STEP and related standards to form an interoperable and adaptable solution across varied equipment and devices. Only such a standardised and digitised product-process-resource description will enable the transformation from resource-based to knowledge-based, networked and adaptive manufacturing.