SAE TECHNICAL

PAPER SERIES 982110

A Design of Internet-Based Remote

Manufacturing System
U. Smutkupt, S. Charoenseang and K. Kawamura
Vanderbilt University

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A Design of Internet-Based Remote
U. Smutkupt, S. Charoenseang and K. Kawamura
Copyright © 1998 Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc.
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses a design of Internet-based remote
manufacturing system, which would help a global com-
pany to centralize its production, to control and to monitor
the operation from the remote sites. In our design, we
describe our system in two main categories, which are
the design system and the manufacturing system. In the
design system, we use the Internet-based client-server
architecture to allow multiple clients to design products
collaboratively and simultaneously. After the design is fin-
ished, it will be sent to the manufacturing system. At this
stage, the clients can control and monitor the process
from geographically distributed locations via the Internet.
INTRODUCTION
From the days of the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing
has evolved from a labor and individual skill-oriented
enterprise to technology-oriented mass production pro-
cess. Many urrent practiced methodologies and tools
such as the Lean manufacturing, the Kanban system,
and TQM are based on the mass production paradigm
[1]. During the last decade, however, there is a definite
trend towards flexible manufacturing with emphasizing
cost-effective manufacture of a variety of related products
in small batches. It also supports the concept of intelli-
gent and agile manufacturing which have been focusing
on effective mass customization [2]. At the same time,
manufacturing is becoming globally distributed rather
than geographically limited due to the impact on limitation
of resources and supplies. Examples of a global com-
pany are as follow [3]:
• Several smaller companies that cooperate to design
and manufacture a product.
• A large manufacturer and its supply chain.
• A global partnership that integrates its activities via
computer communication.
• A flexible organization that changes when new
opportunities appear.
As a global unit, companies should work closely together
to improve efficiency by using shared resources, experts,
1
982110
Manufacturing System
Vanderbilt University
tools, and practical training, etc. [4]. Along with these
concepts, information technology resources, such as the
Internet and the World Wide Web, have been grown
explosively. As a result, these resources are widely used
to establish an infrastructure for collaborative work.
In addition, the current demand of manufacturing to
reduce the time and cost involved in taking a product
from concept to production has forced companies to turn
to new and emerging technologies in the area of design
and manufacturing. One such area is virtual reality. Vir-
tual reality is used as tools for the computer-aided
design, computer-aided manufacturing, design for
assembly, design for manufacturing and manufacturing
simulation. It offers unrivalled scope for modeling or sim-
ulating manufacturing of a product.
REMOTE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM (RMS)
As of manufacturing globalization, the remote manufac-
turing system is proposed to help a global company to
centralize its production, control and monitor the opera-
tion from the remote sites. It would support
interactive, collaborative design and assembly of the
product from remote locations and remotely monitor the
performance of the manufacturing process.
In the RMS, it allows a production site to communicate
with a remote monitoring station that has an intelligent
reasoning agent. This agent controls production and
gives feedback to monitoring agents at a production site
to follow. In this system, a remote monitoring system is
a center for control and a production site is used for man-
ufacturing the products. This concept is shown in Figure
1.
PREVIOUS WORK – Along with the RMS concept, we
develop the Internet-based Robot Teleoperation which is
a key technology for the RMS (Figure 2). This project
allows the users to remotely control an industrial robot,
the Perfomer-MKII, to perform tasks such as pick and
place the object on the table. In this system, the three
main components are a connection media, a production
site and a remote monitoring station.
 • Connection media: The connection media is a tool
that both production site and remote monitoring sta-
tion use to communicate with each other. The exam-
ples of the connection media are the Internet tools
and the World Wide Web. It is economical to adapt
this technology to use for a remote manufacturing.
• Production site: This is the station that shares infor-
mation and contains working resources such as
industrial robots, CNC machines, etc. These
resources will be controlled to perform tasks by
receiving commands from operators at a remote
monitoring station. To be controllable, a production
site should operate as multiple servers to allow the
remote monitoring station to receive information, to
receive commands from the remote monitoring sta-
tion, to control resources, and to send live video back
to the remote monitoring station.
• Remote monitoring station: This is the station that
allows operators to control resources at a production
site. Initially, this station connects to the production
site to obtain the information feedback from the pro-
duction site such as the processing time, the live
video feedback. After that, the operator will use a
graphic operator interface to control and monitor the
resources’ operation flows.
PROPOSED IDEA – From the Internet-based Robot
Teleoperation project, we found that not only manufactur-
ing process but also design process is very important for
creating cost-effective production. Thus, we integrate the
design process into the RMS. In the design process, we
use the Internet-based client-server architecture to allow
multiple clients to collaboratively design products among
clients. After the design is finished, it will be sent to the
manufacturing
process. At this stage, the client can control and monitor
the process from geographically distributed locations.
SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
From the RMS concept, we include both design and man-
ufacturing process with our system. This system is shown
in Figure 3. In our system, we allow multiple users to
access the design system to design a product or a pro-
cess to make a product by using a virtual link. The virtual
link is the computer communication using the Internet
tools such as video conferencing, white board, 3-D CAD
tools, and etc. After the design is finished, the system will
create commands or codes for related resources, which
will be used to make a product. These commands or
codes will be sent to the manufacturing system. Then,
the system transfers these commands or codes to all
related resources through a physical link to make a real
production. This link is a control link to the resource such
as the robot, the CNC, and the conveyor from the control-
lers of the manufacturing system. At this stage, users can
monitor the operation and still have authority to rearrange
or cancel the operation.
2
As mentioned earlier, our system can be divided to two
main systems, which are the design system and the man-
ufacturing system.
DESIGN SYSTEM – We decide to use the virtual reality
to provide a virtual environment for the designers to
design the products and to evaluate the manufacturability
and affordability of the products, and for engineers to
evaluate new or revised product designs with respect to
shop floor related activities.
In this system (Figure 4), we need to start the server to
wait for the connections from the clients. After the client
requests for a connection to the server, the server will
accept and establish a connection. This connection is
based on the Internet-based socket communication. To
make a connection, the client could be a stand-alone
application or a HTML-based control page over the World
Wide Web. In addition, multiple clients are allowed to
connect to the server for communicating with each other
and work together to get a design or a production pro-
cess. To implement these tasks, the following Internet
tools are established.
• Live video conferencing: This tool provides the capa-
bility to interconnect two or more parties with both
audio and video. A minimum requirement is that each
party involved has a microphone, speakers and a
video camera attached to the computer. It is also
possible to participate in a video conference without
a video camera, in which case one sees and hears
the other parties, and can talk with them [5].
• White board: This tool simply transmits images
between parties. These images are static images
that users can annotate with text or simple graphics
symbol.
• Chat tool: This tool is simply designed to allow a
large number of people to chat among themselves in
real time, from various locations.
• File transferring tool: This tool is a utility that lets
users transfer files over the Internet. To transfer files,
two computers are involved; the server, and the cli-
ent. First, the client will connect to the server. Then
the client will send the server commands, and the
server will respond to them.
• 3-D modeling tool: This tool is a utility that let users
create the 3-D drawings.
Since the system allows multiple users to access the sys-
tem at the same time, we need to specify the priority for
each user in order to modify the shared work. The priority
is assigned differently based on his or her responsibility
such as a draft man has a lower priority than a graphic
designer. The higher priority the user obtains, the higher
responsibility the user has in work. To finish this process,
a supervisory team is formed to criticize and finalize the
design.
After the design is finished, the final design product will agents, so they can calculate, communicate and negoti-
be coded into a machine-controlled code that can be ate to get the best result automatically.
interpreted by the manufacturing system. This code will
be sent to the manufacturing system server. CONCLUSIONS

MANUFACTURING SYSTEM – This system is responsi-
ble for making a real production at a production site. The
production site could be any site in a global company,
which have the best capability. This production site is
designed to allow multiple clients to connect with its
server to make a production. Thus, the client can control
and monitor the process from geographically distributed
locations.
In this system (Figure 5), the manufacturing server is
established to retrieve the codes or commands from the
design system. After that, these codes or commands will
be executed to get the shop floor scheduling. At this step,
the server will know exactly what resource is going to be
processed orderly and when it is finished. Then, as soon
as the machines are available, the production will be
started. The server will create the low-level machine
commands based on the codes obtained from the design
system, and send them to operate the machines.
During this operation, the clients can monitor the process
using live video feedback tool. This tool will broadcast live
video from several controllable moving camera heads in
the shop floor. This video can help the clients to obtain
the status of the machine's operation. If there is any prob-
lem, the clients can stop the operation of the machines
and solve the problems from the remote site. Moreover,
the clients have an authority to rearrange machine's
schedules or to cancel their operation at anytime. In addi-
tion, the other Internet-based tools such as video confer-
encing, chat, white board, are used to make a
communication between the clients and the local engi-
neers. This assists the clients to work with the local engi-
neers remotely.
In this paper, we have presented the RMS as a new gen-
eration of manufacturing technology. It is integrated with
an information technology to allow companies to work
together without the problem of distance. As we see
today, a definite trend of future manufacturing system
towards to be globally distributed rather than geographi-
cally limited due to the impact on limitations of resources
and supplies. Moreover, Companies also try to work
closer together to improve efficiency by using shared
resources, experts, tools, practical training, etc.
In our RMS, there are two main systems. One is the
design system. It allows global companies to collabora-
tively design product among partners. All partners should
be selected from only their specialist whereas a distance
is omitted. The second is the manufacturing system. We
allow partner's companies connect to the appropriate
production site to produce a product. This process could
create an expertise production.
Finally, we expect that the RMS concept would enhance
the present-day manufacturing to be more flexible, faster,
more interactive, and more efficient. The RMS testbed is
currently implemented at the Center for Intelligent Sys-
tems, Vanderbilt University.

CURRENT IMPLEMENTATIONS

From the RMS system, we develop a testbed that

focuses on the manufacturing system first. In this test-
bed, the code will be generated when the user selects
the operation from the HTML-based control page over
the World Wide Web. After that, the code will be sent to
the server from the remote location. At the server, this Figure 1. Concept of the Remote Manufacturing System
code will be translated as a task and then this task will be
broken down to a set of subtasks. The next important
process is to find the most appropriate resources to per-
form all subtasks. This procedure is done by using a rela-
tively well-studied message-passing paradigm called
contract net protocol [6]. First, a broadcast message
from each subtask will be sent to all resources. After the
resource receives it, the resource will make a response.
The resource, which can give the highest benefit, will be
selected to perform this subtask. Moreover, this is the
automatic process that applies an agent architecture in
the system. We represent all resources as intelligent

3
Figure 2. Architecture of the Internet-Based Robot
Teleoperation
REFERENCES
Figure 3. The System Architecture of the RMS
Figure 4. Architecture of Design System
Figure 5. Architecture of Manufacturing System
1. K. Kawamura, G. Biswas, and J. Bourne, “The Virtual Man-
ufacturing Village: Shared Methodologies and Tools for
Advanced Manufacturing,” NSF/CRCD Concept Paper,
1996.
2. G. Biswas, K. Kawamura, A. Saad, and M. Curtin, “Intelli-
gent and Environmentally Conscious Manufacturing Sys-
tems – State of the Art,” International Journal of
Environmentally Conscious Design and Manufacturing, Vol.
4, No. 2, pp. 1-10, 1995.
3. Edward Lin, Ioannis Minis, Dana S. Nau, Jeffrey W. Her-
rmann, and William C. Regli, “Contribution to Virtual Manu-
facturing Background Research,” Technical Report, The
University of Maryland, 1995.
4. Uttapol Smutkupt, “Internet-Based Teleoperation – A Key
Technology for Remote Manufacturing System,” Master’s
Thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1998
5. Tracy Wemett-Specht, “Videoconferrence Feature Articles,”
WWW page, http://www.videoconference.com.
6. Van Dyke Parunak, H. “Manufacturing Experience with the
Contract Net,” Distributed Artificial Intelligence. M.N.
Huhns, editor, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Los Altos,
CA, pp. 285-310, 1987.