Strategies to develop a telemonitoring technology for machine tools via the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW) can provide machining systems with remote monitoring capabilities through highly graphical user interfaces. As part of a feasibility study, an experimental system to check the availability of the current WWW protocols and languages for on-line machining data transfer and representation was developed. The system consists of a machine tool with PC-based NC, sensors, servers and terminal clients. The primary limitations of standard WWW techniques applied to the dynamic monitoring were found. A functionally distributed monitoring architecture to overcome these disadvantages is proposed. The present approach also provides recommendations for reconstructing complex user interfaces and virtual reality on the client side by utilizing a few of the machine tool parameters.