Remote Monitoring and Control of Manufacturing System

Generally, e-manufacturing is described as the use of Internet to exchange information and achieve rapid response in a distributed and disperse manufacturing environment. The concept of e-manufacturing has emerged during the last years as a consequence of the popularization of Internet applications in business processes. The so-called e-business has added speed to many activities related to the manufacturing industry, particularly to those related to the interaction with suppliers, partners and customers. The high-level of competition among industries, the need of minimizing lead-times, and the demand for optimized scheduling procedures are among the reasons that have been pushing the development of Internet-based applications to exchange information in all levels of an organization. According to (Lee, 2003), e-manufacturing is a recent concept developed to answer the needs of e-business strategies and meet the requirements for the complete integration of all business elements including all suppliers, customer service networks and manufacturing units through the effective use of web-enabled computational tools and tether-free technologies. E-manufacturing includes remote facilities with the ability to monitor the plant floor assets, predict variation in performance, dynamically reschedule production and maintenance operations, and synchronize related and consequent actions in order to achieve a complete integration between manufacturing systems and upper-level enterprise applications. E-manufacturing is a broad field of research. A number of examples of successful applications and researches can be found in literature and in industry. In (Hao et al, 2005), the problem of factory integration is approached by proposing a framework based on Web Services and agents that actuates in all levels of the organization from the virtual enterprise (inter-enterprise), to the enterprise (intra-enterprise) and shop floor levels. (Wang et al, 2001) explores the Internet for product data management. It proposes an integrated data model to the information integration for remote robot manufacturing. The data model is exchanged among geographically spread customers, suppliers, design and manufacturing companies,