Remote Monitoring and Control in a Distributed Manufacturing Environment

Remote monitoring and control are crucial in decentralized manufacturing environments. This is evidenced by today’s distributed shop floors where agility and responsiveness are required to maintain high productivity and flexibility. However, there exists a lack of an effective system architecture that integrates remote condition monitoring and control of automated equipment. Addressing this problem, this chapter introduces a web-based and sensor-driven technique that bridges this missing link. A framework of WISE-SHOPFLOOR (Web-based integrated sensor-driven e-shop floor) was designed to realize such a concept. The conceptulization, architectural design, and system implementation are discussed in detail and two case studies on robot control and remote machining are presented. Enabled by Java and web technologies, WISE-SHOPFLOOR demonstrates significant promise of intelligent distributed manufacturing.