A methodology for web-based manufacturing management and control

The objective of this work is to present a methodology for Web-based manufacturing management and control. This methodology is a part of the WebMachining system, which is based on the Electronic-Manufacturing concept. The WebMachining virtual company encompasses three distributed manufacturing systems, all of them located in different cities in Brazil, i.e. Flexible Manufacturing Cell (FMC) at Graco/UnB (Brasilia), FMS at SOCIESC (Joinville), and Lathe at UFSC (Florianopolis). The proposed methodology includes planning, scheduling, control, and remote manufacturing of parts. The user (customer) uses the manufacturing services based on the SOA (Service Oriented Application) provided by the WebMachining virtual company through the Internet, in order to execute operations and processes to design and manufacture the parts. The proposed methodology integrates engineering and manufacturing management through an ERP software that will preview which of the three systems will produce the ordered part, and this decision is based on parameters related to each of the three systems. After the decision, the ERP system will generate the production schedule. Also in this work the implementation aspects of a Web-based shop floor controller for the FMC at Graco/UnB are presented. The FMC consists of a Romi Galaxy 15M turning center, an ASEA IRB6 robot manipulator, a Mitutoyo LSM-6100 laser micrometer, an AGV, and a pallet to store the blank and finished parts. The functional model, which depicts the modules and their relationships in the Web-based shop floor controller, serves as a basic model to implement the real system. After that, the proposed implementation architecture based on the object oriented technology is presented.