The industrial automation community and the machine tool industry have struggled for years with many attempts at communication standards.  Each technology had its own difficulties with operating systems, firewalls or vendor acceptance.  The MTConnect® Standard was designed as a “universal factory floor communications protocol” that answered these concerns through the use of web technologies that are operating system, firewall and vendor independent.  The MTConnect® Standard is designed specifically for the shop floor environment.   The MTConnect® Standard’s unique solution is  to create a “dictionary” for machine tool data. Each detail of the machine is provided with full context – name, definition, scaling etc.  This dictionary allows vendors to confidently implement their solutions knowing that customers will not be frustrated with the technology hurdles of the past.

The following diagram shows the basic MTConnect® architecture with MTConnect® Clients connecting the MTConnect® Agents.  MTConnect® Agents are Web Server applications that listen for MTConnect requests, requests that are formulated in the “dictionary” defined by the MTConnect® standard.  The MTConnect® Agent supplies data to any MTConnect® client.  Clients receive data in a text format called XML (EXtensible Markup Language), a web standard for data communications.  The MTConnect® Agents are defined as Rest Services.

The goal of the MTConnect® standard is to provide the “language” that MTConnect® Clients and MTConnect® Agents will use to communicate information about the MTConnect® Device.  The following diagram shows the architecture for the Devices, Component and associated Data Items.

In this diagram the structure of MTConnect®’s Data Architecture shows the organization of Devices, Components and Data Items.  Devices serve as the representatives to existing machine tools.  In this instance the Lathe is our Device.  Devices can have Data Items that are directly associated with the device (Availability, CommPort and Status) or have Data Items associated with Components (A Axis and Z Axis).  Components represent major physical systems of the device (Axis, Controller, Sensor or Actuator).  Data Items are individual elements of information about the Device or Component.  Each data item contains a rich set of additional information including units, scale, coordinate system and constraints.