I'm hopelessly new to the area of CNC's, so please bear with me. I'm also new to this website, so if this isn't the sort of thing you post, feel free to yell at me!

The company I work for has been developing an 'intelligent' optimized scheduler for jobshops. As part of the process, the user is required to indicate enough job information (we deal with laser cutting/welding/etc) for the software to estimate the process time for each machine in the shop.

Based on several parameters, such as due-dates or machine availability, the software produces a schedule. For a little while I've been mulling over the posibility of integrating our software with the DNC/CNC systems available in the user's shop. With this capability we could then modify the schedule if a job process finishes early, or the machine goes down.

Ideally I'd love to see an open interface guideline for the communication. I've seen standards such as MDSI's schema, which would fit the bill nicely for us, I believe. Are there any universally (or nearly universal) standards? Does anyone else have any experience in this area? Any tales of woe?

I would think that we could deal with 3-4 different standards, but if this requires dealing with 60+ control OEM's this isn't going to work for us.

Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

hello,
I believe that you are talking of a system similar to throughput software,
you may or may not have an ERP. You want this to communicate with your
automation system.

I believe that most automation systems for CNC's should work.

Ethernet should be the preferred communication as you will get speed and
multiple connectivity, but look out weather you need to buy ethernet
drivers for such systems.

As you said it, you have narrowed it down to several vendors.

Anand