Data collection for reactive process planning and scheduling

Summary form only given. The increasing importance of agility in manufacture has led to a demand for more flexible, powerful and reactive process planning and scheduling tools. This requires manufacturing practice to be improved, streamlined and run in parallel. There is a need for a data collection strategy which is simple, uniform and affordable by SMEs, preferably based on standard networking. The work builds upon a previous generation of cell control, but using improved hardware and computer facilities, a more portable and transferable system is under development. When complete, this work will eventually provide a 'toolkit' to enable data capture from almost any manufacturing system. The 'toolkit' will be simple, cheap and will make use of readily available hardware. Once data has been captured it can then be made available in a format where it can be handled by process planning and scheduling software, also under development in a related project. The research continues to develop the methods and hardware necessary for this modular interfacing approach and will, when concluded, provide a cheap method of data capture, easily accessible and implemented by smaller organisations.