MT Connect and CCAT

MT Connect is a protocol/standard developed for the purpose of allowing machine tools to communicate information about themselves to other computer systems. For instance, this allows a machine to report its current status - whether it's broken down, working, or idle. It can also report its current spindle speed, feed rate, location, and even the current line of g-code that it's running.

All in all, it's a pretty great way to be able to collect activation/utilization data on any machine, regardless of the brand or make or model of controller running it. The obvious upside for simulation users is that you can process the data from a machine and get a list of state-change events and what times they happened at. This data can be run through a distribution-fitting tool, and spit out mean time between failure and mean time to repair distributions. There's a very good paper on this topic here.

The standard is still evolving. Right now it really only covers the machine resources on a shop floor, but at some point I hope it will include labor resources, and part/process tracking. This would allow us to get accurate cycle time/setup time observations on a part-process-machine level, and get us to the point where simulation models can be initialized to the current state of the system being modeled, and then run to predict the next few hours or days or weeks worth of production.

MT Connect can help turn simulation users into basically a weather man, though instead of predicting the weather they're predicting when jobs will be completed and planning contingencies in case a machine goes down. Powerful stuff.

And CCAT is hoping to help make this a reality. We have been attending the MT Connect standards meetings, and I just finished developing a proof-of-concept JavaScript/HTML-based viewer for MT Connect, which I'll detail more in a post to come.