The architecture development of Industry 4.0 compliant smart machine tool system (SMTS)

As part of the fourth industrial revolution, the movement to apply various enabling technologies under the name of Industry 4.0 is being promoted worldwide. Because of the wide range of applications and the capacity of manufacturing workpieces flexibly, machine tools are regarded as essential industrial elements. Hence, much research has been concerned with applying various enabling technologies such as cyber-physical systems to machine tools. To realize a machine tool suitable for Industry 4.0, development should be done in a systematic manner rather than the ad-hoc application of enabling technologies. In this paper, we propose a functional architecture for the Industry 4.0 version of machine tools, namely smart machine tool system. To reflect the voices of various stakeholders, stakeholder requirements are identified and transformed into design considerations. The design considerations are incorporated into the conceptual model and functional modeling, both of which are used to derive the functional architecture. The implementation procedure and an illustrative case study are presented for the application of the functional architecture.