Application of manufacturing message specification for flexible manufacturing system control

This paper describes the development of the internal communication in a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS), using Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) and based on a Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP) network. Because the machines, of which the FMS consists, had few possibilities for communication with external devices, effort had to be put into making machine-specific interfaces between the NC machines and the MAP network. The interfaces were implemented by developing applications that translate MMS messages into machine-specific data and vice versa. The results of the project show that MMS can be used for the control of manufacturing machines that were not designed for use in a network for flexible manufacturing. MMS is not yet widely used. Therefore this paper is meant to demonstrate that MMS can easily be put into practice using relatively simple and off-the-shelf equipment.