Abstract :
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
