26-04-06 17:31
Age: 4 yrs

BY: WONG, CHIEN YAW

This report is the result of seven weeks of work by Chien Yaw WONG from Institute for Manufacturing (IfM), University of Cambridge. Out of the seven weeks of project, a week was spent at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Auto-ID Centre, Boston to engage the scientists about the issues around this project. This report contains the project information regarding the integration of Auto-ID Tagging System with an emerging approach to distributed control referred to as Holonic Manufacturing System (HMS). This project involves integrating an HMS developed at IFM, University of Cambridge and Auto-ID Tagging System initially developed at MIT. Both the system were successfully integrated but full integration was not possible due to on-going development work at MIT Auto-ID Centre and lack of development time. The main deliverable of this project is a software interface referred to as XCHANGE, which enables communication between the HMS and the Auto-ID Tagging System. The XCHANGE is capable of on-the-fly extraction of product information and converting them into the format used by HMS. A CRMInterface (CustomerRelationshipManagementInterface) was also developed to provide a graphical user interface for customers to customize their production order, check and alter production requirements, and automatically communicate with the XCHANGE for product synchronization. The benefit of this integration was analysed and a video demonstration was developed to illustrate the key benefits.

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