Workforce Development Using MTConnect

Workforce Development Using MTConnect

Manufacturing industry relies heavily on the skilled workforce to drive innovation, productivity and remain globally competitive. The rise of the high-tech manufacturing is changing the environment drastically; there is a need to attract young skilled personnel to take over the existing aging manufacturing workforce. Employment in high-tech manufacturing is expected to grow by 23.8 % over next 10 years . The aerospace and defense industry has already a backlog of production that extends to 2030, requiring continuous requirement of new workforce. Unfortunately, the sector has failed to attract the young and bright student to choose manufacturing as their career path. Manufacturing has a perception of old, smoky work places with repetitive jobs, lack of technology and no advancement prospects. According to a recent skills gap report, more than 83 % of U.S. manufacturers report an overall shortage of qualified employees. There is urgent need to revamp traditional teaching meth¬ods used in manufacturing education to ensure a robust supply of essential human capital required for a thriving domestic manufacturing industry.

Reference: Workforce Development Using MTConnect, 2014 MTConnect: Connecting Manufacturing Conference.

Autonomous In-Process Quality Control

Intense global competition has forced many US manufacturers to examine their current business practices as well as evaluate how to meet these challenges and remain competitive.  Major emphasis has been placed on disruptive innovation and manufacturing research with recognition of the need to improve product and process quality, automation, and decrease scrap.

The traditional manufacturing process is to produce a part on machine, transfer it to the coordinate measuring machine, check for quality, and make decisions.  If the quality is found unacceptable, the production line is stopped to locate and alleviate the root cause of the defect. In such Post Production Quality Control practice, not only is the part inspected scrapped, but also a considerable amount of work in progress (WIP) is purged. This preventative quality control practice, which barely manages to satisfy customer quality requirements, is not sustainable in today’s competitive market place.

As a better solution, manufacturers have embraced the concept of Post Process Quality Control utilizing on-machine probing technologies. In this reactive methodology, the part is measured for quality attributes on the machine itself after completion of a single/multiple machining process ensuring quality at source. It leads to lesser WIP scrap and the need for CMM evaluation. However, it still suffers the drawback of measuring the non-conforming part after it’s produced. Additionally, this method does not support the philosophy of first part correct. It also consumes expensive machine time for quality checks (reduced throughput at the given station) and may require special labor skills to operate the probe and probing routines.

The goal is to develop a MTConnect-enabled, autonomous, in-process quality control system for manufacturing first part correct with integrated user-initiated alarm management. The proposed In-Process Quality Control predictive methodology monitors critical, real-time process/machining parameters, checks them against boundary limits, and then raises alarms/alerts. The philosophy is fundamentally different from Post Production Quality Control and Post Process Quality Control because we measure and constrain the in-process machining parameters like power, forces, torque, thermal effects, vibration level, etc…, which cause quality issues, instead of reacting to the problem after it has already occurred. The proposed system will ensure zero scrap and minimum downtime thus boosting the overall equipment effectiveness and process capability indices.  Another major benefit of the system will be to reduce the number of inspected parts in a batch of final product which will directly translate into reduced lead time and inspection cost.

The current alarm management systems are not customizable and user-initiated.  Some problems include too many alarms on display, high alarm rates (flooding), false alarms, repeating alarms, excess grouping of alarms, no defined action, and wrong recipient.  Also, the current alarms are based on the equipment health/condition and not process conformance. The proposed system will eliminate these issues and have an integrated, user-initiated alarm management system that will notify the user of real-time faults and process violations.  

Lastly, the system will be MTConnect standard compatible. The current manufacturing systems are proprietary. Vendors bundle together software and hardware for competitive purposes. The MTConnect Initiative was started to address the need for a standard that will help realize a "seamless manufacturing pipeline" from design to production. The goal of this pipeline approach is to allow for “universal” capture of data from the machine tool which would transfer this captured data into other control systems thereby facilitating a seamless method for managing and analyzing data for process and product optimization. MTConnect compatibility will ensure industry-wide applications, easier integration, and commercial viability for the proposed In-Process Quality Control system.     

Getting Started with MTConnect: Connectivity Guide

The MTConnect connectivity guide is now available for download at the mtconnect.org website. Click here to download (direct link) the connectivity guide. 

The article is an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in getting the first-hand knowledge of the MTConnect standard and its potential benefits to manufacturing. Though most of the sections in the document explain the technical aspects, Section 3 and Section 4 focus on benefits and steps to get started with MTConnect implementation.

Content Overview:

Section 1 - Introduction

Section 2 - MTConnect Overview

Section 3 -  What Problems Do Companies Solve With MTConnect?

• Production Dashboard or Monitor
• Alerts
• Equipment Availability and Usage
• Machine Downtime Analysis
• Overall Equipment Effectiveness:
• Production Reporting/Tracking
• Maintenance Tracking/Planning

Section 4 – How to Begin

• Step 1 – Define the Problem That You Are Trying to Solve
• Step 2 – What Does Success Look Like?
• Step 3 – Define Your Equipment
• Step 4 – Define Limitations/Restraints That Impact Your Project
• Step 5 – List the People in Your Organization Who Will Impact the Project

Section 5 - I Know What I Need – How Do I Get It Done?

Section 6 -  Information (Data) Available using MTConnect

Section 7- Connecting a MTConnect Device to a Network

Section 8 - Conclusions

Appendix A – MTConnect Glossary of Terms

Appendix B – MTConnect Project Work Sheet

Appendix C – MTConnect Data Model and Data Types 

Click here to download (direct link) the connectivity guide. 

Sustainable Manufacturing: Applications to Monitor your Equipment

Recently, the MTConnect Institute completed a survey of currently available applications which utilize the MTConnect standard to enable sustainable manufacturing. The survey was conducted as part of the "Sustainable Aerospace Manufacturing Initiative (SAMI)" for the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM) and Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology, Inc. (CCAT).

The SAMI report is now available for download at the MTConnect Institute website. Click here to access the report in PDF format  (261 pages, 4 MB). 

MTConnect Live

The MTConnect EMC2 Linux CNC simulator is now available online at http://agent.mtconnect.org/probe. One can test and play with the protocol, understand the XML schema and also use it as a testing source for building custom client applications. Current versions of EMC are entirely licensed under the GNU General Public License and Lesser GNU General Public License (GPL and LGPL). Both the LinuxCNC and EMC are non commercial efforts.

The agent is running in a continual spiral program that automatically restarts after 30 second pause. The output of the adapter can be tested using telnet at agent.mtconnect.org (port 7878). To get a sample of monitored parameters visit: http://agent.mtconnect.org/sample. To get current values of the monitored parameters visit: http://agent.mtconnect.org/current.

Linux Kernel Development Statistics

Linux is undoubtedly the largest and the most vibrant open source project till date. The following statistics from the Linux Kernel Development article quantify this massive effort.

*Around 3,621 lines were added, 1,550 lines were removed, and 1,425 lines were changed every day for the past 2.5 years

*A small number of companies (like Novell, Redhat) are responsible for a large number of changes. But there is a "long tail" of companies which have made significant changes.

*There is a new Linux kernel release every 2.7 months.

*The top 10 individual developers have contributed almost 15 % of the changes and the top 30 developers have contributed 30 %. Thus there are few developers who contribute a lot and lots of developers which contribute a few. There is a marked inequality of work.

* 70% of the kernel development is done by developers who are being paid by the companies for their work.

* Individual development community has doubled in the last 3 years.

Commercial Organizations Involved

Open Source Projects double every 14 months!

Based on the models developed for the "Exponential Growth of Open Source" study we calculated the time required to double the number of projects and the total open source code. It took approximately 13.89 months to double the total number of open source projects from 1995-2006. Please refer the "The Total Growth of Open Source" paper for the details of the approach and analysis. On the same lines, it took around 12.49 months to double the total open source lines of code for the projects considered. That means every year (plus a month or so) both the total number of projects and lines of code double! The interesting question is: Can Open Source sustain this exponential growth?

Exponential Growth of Open Source

Software development is undergoing a major change away from a fully closed software process towards a process that incorporates open source software in products and services. Just how significant is that change? To answer this question we need to look at the overall growth of open source as well as its growth rate. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the growth of more than 5000 active and popular open source software projects. We show that the total amount of source code as well as the total number of open source projects is growing at an exponential rate. Previous research showed linear and quadratic growth in lines of source code of individual open source projects. Our work shows that open source is expanding into new domains and applications at an exponential rate.

Authors: Amit Deshpande, Dirk Riehle

Reference: The Total Growth of Open Source; Deshpande A., Riehle D.; The Fourth International Conference on Open Source Systems, Sep 2008, Milan, Italy.

Continuous Integration in Open Source Software Development

Commercial software firms are increasingly using and contributing to open source software. Thus, they need to understand and work with open source software development processes. This paper investigates whether the practice of continuous integration of agile software development methods has had an impact on open source software projects. Using fine-granular data from more than 5000 active open source software projects we analyze the size of code contributions over a project’s life-span. Code contribution size has stayed flat. We interpret this to mean that open source software development has not changed its code integration practices. In particular, within the limits of this study, we claim that the practice of continuous integration has not yet significantly influenced the behavior of open source software developers.

Reference: Continuous Integration in Open Source Software Development; Deshpande A., Riehle D.; IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2008, Volume 275/2008, 273-280, DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-09684-1_23

First Look IE 8

For a past three days I am using evaluating the new Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 version. The first thing you will notice is that the domain highlight feature in IE 8. The exact domain name is highlighted excluding the other address parameters.

IE 8 comes with many other features for web developers and web designers. The ‘Activities’ allow you to map an address on webpage directly to Yahoo or MSN (not Google) maps. The map opens up in small interactive window without forcing the user to leave the current window. Other useful Activities currently supported include eBay product search, Facebook and StumbleUpon. The Webslices, developer tools and Ajax features empower the user to use the web in better and intelligent way. Check out the Ajax navigation features which stores the browser state using Ajax (especially useful when browsing a map). The developer tools allow the easy debugging of the applications within the IE eliminating the need to download auxiliary applications.

Yahoo mail is still not compatible with IE8. I had to switch back to mail Classic to access my email. Also my iGoogle personal homepage also gave some error with IE 8. However this should be temporary and resolved shortly. Anyway I will better use Firefox for time being but will certainly keep an 'open' eye on IE8 development.

Comprehensive Open Source Software List

I came across the most comprehensive open source software list titled ‘OPEN SOURCE GOD: 480+ Open Source Applications’. The article includes the software description and web links to their respective website. The list contains open source software in the field of accounting, content management systems, customer relationship management, email clients, graphics, video and audio tools and many others. It is the most comprehensive list I have ever come across. It also has links to other listings like Word press plug-ins, Fire fox plug-ins and resources for online productivity and media. Another comprehensive open source software list and reference can be found at Guy Snir’s webpage at http://eoslist.com/ .
Let us embrace the rich and effective open source products…

Open Source super-linear growth # 2

Currently I am investigating the trend and patterns in the overall open source software growth. We are using the source lines of code as our metric to measure the total open source growth across thousands of open source projects. Personally I think that open source is not just growing super linearly but exponentially. There are many reasons I think that it is increasing exponentially (current research) but here I will just like to unveil the open source penetration in the web server market. Apache which is an open source web server outperforms the proprietary Microsoft web server IIS by a large margin. According to the Netcraft survey (April 2007) of 1.2 billion websites, Apache had a share of 58.8 % while Microsoft had 31% share. Also, looking at the usage trends the Apache web server seems to have much more healthier future than Microsoft IIS web server. Considering the fact that web is increasing at a tremendous rate, the IIS usage seems to be constant or mostly declining. The sudden increase in IIS usage in April 2006 can be attributed GoDaddy’s decision to shift to Microsoft technologies away from open source. Except this ‘artificial’ and ‘paid’ (?) sudden spike the IIS is certainly on a decline.

Open Source super-linear growth

Once a territory of a select few developers, researchers and engineers open source is now embraced and supported by government and large software corporations.

Today when I was writing my technical report I came across the article “The Growth of Open Source Software in Organizations”. It is an excellent resource for getting the state-of-the-art information for the open source growth in industry and its implications. The following point in the executive summary reflects (based on the survey of about 512 companies) the super linear growth of open source software development:

“Organizations are saving millions of dollars on IT by using open source software. In 2004, open source software saved large companies (with annual revenue of over $1 billion) an average of $3.3 million. Medium-sized companies (between $50 million and $1 billion in annual revenue) saved an average $1.1 million. Firms with revenues under $50 million saved an average $520,000. Asked to categorize all the benefits (cost savings and other) from open source, most companies said they were moderate or major. Some 70% of large firms are seeing moderate or major benefits from open source. Of the companies under $1 billion in revenue, 59% are seeing major benefits.”

Geometric growth of the Linux kernel

Yesterday I read the article “Growth, Evolution, and Structural Change in Open Source Software” by Michael Godfrey and Qiang Tu. The article analyses the growth of Linux kernel in terms of lines of code since the first release. The statistical model developed for the uncommented lines of code is shown below. Even after crossing two million lines of code the Linux kernel enjoys a geometric growth in terms of lines of code. The model for the commented lines of code shows a similar trend.

Model: y = .21* x² + 252 *x + 90,055

where,

y = size in uncommented LOC

x = days since vl.0

r² = .997 (coefficient of determination calculated using least squares)

Linux enjoys the active support form the ever increasing open source developer community which enables it to sustain such a tremendous growth. More than half of the code is for the various drivers which are independent of the system. The authors have also analyzed the Fetchmail, GCC compiler and VIM editor applications and concluded that ‘the evolution of each open source system is different and cannot be generalized’.

The interesting question is: what’s the trend for the total open source development? Is it increasing linearly, geometrically or may be decreasing. Successful projects like MySQL, Apache, Eclipse, SugarCRM, and OpenOffice indicate that Open Source must be increasing at a super linear rate. Still a formal analysis of open source is required to validate our hypothesis.

TCS joins the Open Source Initiative

I will be completing my internship with Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs, Palo Alto next month. In the past five months I learned a lot about the Open Source and its strong presence in Europe and America. The sad thing was that even after having a great infrastructure and a huge computer industry in India, I couldn't find a single firm/project contributing to the Open Source development. But things are changing; the young Indian developers and large corporations are now finding value in the Open Source initiative. Today I came across the Open Source project ""WANEM - The Wide Area Network Emulator" supported by the Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services. The project is hosted on SourceForge and licensed under the GNU GPL.

I strongly believe that the Indian companies will benefit the most with Open Source especially considering that most of the companies are service providers and not product companies. The future of the Indian IT sector will be much more secure and independent of outsourcing with the embrace of Open Source development. Especially with the available infrastructure and a large pool of extremely talented developers, Open Source can transform the current business model which is heavily dependent upon outsourcing.

I hope other Indian firms follow the example set by TCS.

Open Source Licenses

Open Source development is crowded with different licenses and their various clauses and conditions for code reuse and distribution. It is an interesting analysis to see how many licenses a single project uses. The natural and most logical answer will be 1, which is correct. I did an analysis of more than 5000 different projects listed in Ossmole. The results are as follows:



About 93% open source projects just use 1 license. The most fascinating point is that there are some projects which use more than 2 licenses. It will be very interesting to study such projects which are using more than 2 licenses. I am just wondering about the requirements or process/business model of such projects which require usage of more than two different licenses. Another interesting point is that there are some projects which do not use any software license (yeah !!!). That means they have no restriction in terms of their usage. A closer analysis of such projects will also be a point of interest.

Open Source Target Customers

Open source is targeted for development of tools and software for the developers. The results below show that 31% of open source projects have a target audience of developers. These projects mainly deal with producing easy to use applications for software development like Eclipse, SVN and CVS. Second in the list is the desktop applications for end-users which has about 26% share. These applications which may serve as a substitute for commercial licenses software’s are targeted at the end user. Examples in this category include Open Office, R, and Weka. Interestingly there are some applications which have audiences in area of religion, legal industry and education. A list of top 20 audience/target industry for open source projects is summarized below.

Open Source Projects Development Stages

SourceForge classifies projects in seven different categories i.e. Planning, Pre-alpha, Alpha, Alpha, Beta, Production, Mature and Inactive, according to their development status. The following article shows an analysis in which I have quantified the percentage of projects in each category.



Observations

1. There are a lot of single developer projects which do not have any significant activity after the initial project registration. The high percentage of projects in planning stage indicates this fact.
2. The highest number of projects is in the beta testing phase. Thus one may expect a lot of open source projects in the production/stable category in the near future.
3. The lowest number of projects in the mature category indicate that a very few projects ultimately reach maturation.
4. Some projects are in inactive state where the project administrator declares the project shut down. SourceForge frequently removes these projects from the directory.

# developer vs. stage

In my earlier post I analyzed the number of projects according to their development stage. I took a step further and analyzed the average number of developers in projects according to their development stage. The table below shows the average number of developers over all the projects in each development stage.



It can be seen that the developers go on increasing as the project advances in development from pre-planning to mature stage. There is an initial drop from the planning to pre-planning stage but once the project is started there is a consistent increase in the developers. Thus the community around the project increases with the increase in the development of the project. The lowest number of developers can be seen in the inactive stage. Decreasing number of participants may be one of the reasons for the project to be inactive. Hence, one may conclude that for a successful open source project active participation from the open source community is a must. If there is an active open source community there is open source!!!