Three tiered web-based manufacturing system—Part 1: System development

This paper provides a demonstration of harnessing the power of the Internet to enable collaborative manufacturing in such a setup where the key components such as the human resource personnel and the manufacturing equipment are geographically separated. As part of the framework a platform independent and cost-effective means of remotely operating a 3-axis computer numerical control (CNC) drilling machine securely via the Internet has been developed. In addition, an infrastructure to allow remote manufacturers to collaborate on a product design as well to monitor the drilling process in real time is presented. The framework rests on sound security foundation implemented using technologies such as firewall, authentication modules and transport layer security (TLS) protocol to promote safe usage of the drilling machine. It is worth mentioning that the architectural design is generic and modular in nature and as such, any other genre of CNC machine such as milling and turning could be substituted in place of drilling with only machine-specific changes to the existing system.