WEB-BASED GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACES TO MONITOR AND CONTROL DISTRIBUTED CIM SYSTEMS

The complexity and cost of maintaining human-manufacturing system interfaces is driven by the constant changes to production equipment, machinery, software, sensors controls and operational strategies−changes which are needed to remain competitive. The difficulty in developing and maintaining a coherent user-system interface is particularly evident when integrating modules from several vendors with proprietary operator interfaces and little protocol consistency among the system components. In this paper we introduce a new means for constructing graphical user interfaces for control and monitoring of manufacturing systems. Our approach is based on a client/server model separating user interface from application, and is implemented with HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CGI (Common Gateway Interface) technologies. The paper presents a summary of the types of tasks for which this approach is applicable, an overview of the technology, and an example of the approach being implemented to develop a proof of concept model.