A Simulator Testbed for MT-Connect Based Machines in a Scalable and Federated Multi-Enterprise Environment

The emergence and steady adoption of machine communication protocols like the MTConnect are steering the manufacturing sector towards greater machine interoperability, higher operational productivity, substantial cost savings with advanced decision-making capabilities at the shop-floor level. MTConnect GitHub repository and NIST Smart Manufacturing Systems (SMS) Test Bed are two major resources for collecting data from CNC machines. However, these tools would be insufficient and protractive in Modeling & Simulation (M&S) scenarios where spawning hundreds of MTConnect agents and thousands of adapters with real-time virtual machining is necessary for advancing research in the digital supply chain. This paper introduces a flexible simulator testbed of multiple MTConnect agents and adapters for simulating Levels 0 & 1 of the ISA-95 framework and help support R&D activities in complex multi-enterprise supply chain scenarios. To the best knowledge of the authors, there is no publicly accessible multi-enterprise MTConnect testbed yet.