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MTConnect Participation Benefits |
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MTConnect Institute offers a number of participation levels. The following chart outlines these levels and the benefits to each. MTConnect Institute Benefits Chart |
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In a typical day in a manufacturing facility there are hundreds or thousands of machines and independent systems operating in consortia to insure a product is manufactured in a timely, quality and cost-effective manner. Each of these machines and systems accumulates information on its operation and, usually, is unable to communicate it to anyone or anything else. This may not be true in all cases, but overall, it is difficult to communicate information and process data among these machines and systems. As a result, coordination, optimization or data tracking to insure the machine, factory or system is operating at an acceptable level (think machine efficiency, process flow, energy usage, toolpath validation, etc.) is very difficult. |
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MTConnect 's XML-based Approach |
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In a typical scenario in which instrumented equipment emits data files in a proprietary format, extensive knowledge of the schema (data layout, and what each piece of data represents) used by each piece of equipment would be required to accomplish even a simple task. For example, a temperature-analysis software module might want to look for specific temperature-related data in data files emitted by a variety of equipment, while ignoring other fields it does not care about. To accomplish this, all pieces of equipment would have to emit the specific schema for the analysis tool to read. Insisting on this type of a single “portable” schema is difficult to achieve and in the past has not been a universally accepted answer: in this case, advance agreement would be required by all participants as to what data would and would not be included in the schema, and how it would be represented. We are faced with a Hobson’s choice: if each schema is proprietary, interoperation is next to impossible, but trying to get advance agreement on a single “master” schema seems just as hard. |
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MTConnect Institute offers a middleware standard providing the capability to pass data, even from existing data transfer capabilities and formats, to higher level systems using the XML based standard (see Included Figure). |
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