2012 2nd International Conference on Computer Science and Network Technology
A Remote Manufacturing Monitoring System Based
on the Internet of Things
Zhang Xiang-li
School of information and communication ,Guilin University
of Electronic Technology
Guilin,China
xlzhang@guet.edu.cn
Ye Jin
School of information and communication ,Guilin University
of Electronic Technology
Guilin,China
yejin@guet.edu.cn
Abstract—A remote manufacturing monitoring system based on
sensors,RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and network is
designed for keeping track of information which industrial
machines are evaluated with. Different sensors, such as,
temperature transducer, pressure transducer, noise transducer,
current sensor, revolution speed transducer, vibration frequency
transducer and RFID tags, are employed in the system to collect
information from the industrial machines. The lower-layer field
data collection system is linked with the upper-layer monitoring
and diagnosis application system via Zigbee, industry Ethernet
and WiFi (Wireless Fidelity). The monitoring system is
implemented on machine tools with a user friendly interface. The
tests show that the system could check machine tool status
efficiently. Both software and hardware implementation are
demonstrated in this work.
Keywords: Remote Manufacturing Monitoring; RFID; Sensor;
the Internet of Things
I. INTRODUCTION
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging global Internet-
based information architecture facilitating the exchange of
goods and services in global supply chain networks. From a
technical point of view, the architecture is based on data
communication tools, primarily RFID-tagged items (Radio-
Frequency Identification). The most popular industry proposal
for the new IT-infrastructure of the IoT is based on an
Electronic Product Code (EPC). The “things” are physical
objects carrying RFID tags with a unique EPC; the
infrastructure can offer and query EPC Information Services
(EPCIS) both locally and remotely to subscribers. Another tool
is sensor and Internet. Sensor networks have gained worldwide
attention in recent years. The sensor nodes can sense, measure,
and gather information from the environment and, based on
some local decision process, they can transmit the sensed data
to the user. A Sensor network consists of a number of sensor
nodes (few tens to thousands) working together to monitor a
region to obtain data about the environment.
978-1-4673-2964-4/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE
Yan Kun
School of information and communication ,Guilin University
of Electronic Technology
Guilin,China
yankun@guet.edu.cn
Li Jian
School of information and communication ,Guilin University
of Electronic Technology
Guilin,China
hncd_lijian@163.com
The technology of the things of internet used in the field of
factory to sense the information from machines becomes a new
research direction of remote monitoring system. In sensor
network, the sensors scattered inside and around the target
collaborate with each other to collect data, process and analyze
data. Employing sensors, any area could be monitored at
anytime. Benefit from the development of sensors, the
manufacture monitoring system could get the data of the target
instruments and the surrounding areas from sensors. Then, the
collected data is transmitted to the remote monitoring system
through network equipments. Because of its application
potential, the manufacture monitoring system based on sensors
attracts a lot of interests recently. Different systems have been
designed for applications, such as environment monitoring,
water monitoring, mine monitoring, etc [1-5]. In most of the
existing systems, the data is collected by a data collecting
module embedded in the target equipments. Then the data can
be transmitted through CAN (Controller Area Network), CC-
link, industry Ethernet or wireless networks with Zigbee,
GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)[6-10]. However, a lot of
aged equipments employed in industry don't have embedded
data collecting module and network interface. Thus, it is quite
difficult to obtain the vital information (temperature, noise,
vibration, etc) from these aged equipments. A manufacture
monitoring system based on sensors is designed thereupon.
Sensors are employed to collect data. Besides the Ethernet and
Zigbee, WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) is also used to transmit the
data in our designed system. ZigBee over IEEE 802.15.4,
defines specifications for lowrate WPAN for supporting simple
devices that consume minimal power and typically operate in
the personal operating space (POS) of 10m. ZigBee provides
self-organized, multi-hop, and reliable mesh networking with
long battery lifetime. Wireless fidelity includes IEEE 802.1
la/b/g standards for wireless local area networks. It allows
users to surf the Internet at broadband speeds when connected
to an access point (AP) or in ad hoc mode.System construction
is presented in Section II. Section III demonstrates the design
of software and hardware. The implementation of the system
can be found in Section IV, and Section V is the conclusion.
221 CHANGCHUN, CHINA
 II. SYSTEM DESIGN
There are two layers in the existing manufacture monitoring Wifi
systems: one is field layer, the other is external network layer. Communication User
Interface
The field layer takes care of the communications among the
inner instrument control unit, the servo driver and the I/O
control systems. The external network layer links the Remote
monitoring system, the peripheral devices and the host Ethernet Monitoring
computers. As illustrated in Fig. 1, to expand the field lay, the Interface Server
sensors is employed in the system. Sensors have been SQL
implemented on the target equipments. The data could be Database
Zigbee
collected by these sensors. Then the upper layer in the Communication
monitoring system receives the data from network equipments. Interface
Employing different sensors, this system is flexible to different
requirements.
Figure 3. Data Flow

As depicted in Fig.2, the system is constructed by 12 parts,

such as: the main control chip STC12C5A60S2, the
temperature acquisition module, the noise acquisition module,
the vibration acquisition module, the rotation speed acquisition
module, the pressure acquisition module, the current
acquisition module, the RFID label module, the Ethernet
module (ENC28J60), wireless Zigbee module and the wireless
WiFi module.

Figure 1. System configuration
III. DESIGN OF SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE
B. Software Design
The data from CNC or "computer numerical controlled"
machines, such as temperature, noise, frequency, current,
voltage and rotation rate can be transmitted to the remote
terminal supervisor through wireless communication system.
An SQL (Structured Query Language) database is constructed
to keep the collected data. The data flow is shown in Fig. 3.

A. Field Layer Design The software of the system includes data collection,
transmission, display and analysis. The data collection includes
The field layer could be parted into two units, such as the the data process in sensors and host microcontroller. Data
data collecting unit and the data transmitting unit. The vital transmission includes the communication between host
data of equipments, like temperature, electrical current, noise, microcontroller and monitoring and diagnostic system server
vibration, rotational speed, pressure, label of RFID instruments based on WiFi, industry Ethernet and Zigbee. The data
could be collected by the data collecting unit. Then the data is collection and transmission processing is shown in Fig. 4,
transmitted by the data transmitting unit to the upper layer which is described as follows.
through Ethernet with TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol),Zigbee or WiFi. Step 1: Initializing system;
RFID Step 2: Collecting data from the sensors, such as
modules temperature, noise, frequency, current, voltage and rotation
Temperature
rate, and collecting ID information of machine tools from
modules Industry RFID tags. The Analog signals are converted to digital signals
ethernet modules
Noise by A/D converter in the host microcontroller;
modules
Monitoring Step 3: Data Preprocessing and data fusion in host
Vibration
Host
microcontroller
Wireless
and
diagnostic
microcontroller;
modules
STC12C5A60S2
modules(WiFi)
system Step 4: Sending Data to the monitoring and diagnostic
server
Speed system server periodically. To compatible the three different
modules
​
Wireless communication technology (WiFi, industry Ethernet and
Pressure
modules
modules(Zigbee) Zigbee), the communication software is programmed based on
TCP/IP protocol and Socket technology.
Current
modules

Figure 2. Field layer

222
 Begin

Initializaiton

Data
Collection

Data Fusion

N
Time Out?

Data
Transmission

End
Figure 6. Data collecting module and the transmitting module based on
Figure 4. Data collecting and Transmission Ethernet

IV. IMPLEMENTATION

A. Remote Monitoring Hardware Implementation

A picture of the data collecting module and the
transmitting module is shown in Fig. 5. Different sensors, such
as, temperature transducer, pressure transducer, noise
transducer, current sensor, revolution speed transducer,
vibration frequency transducer and RFID label transducer are
employed here. Three communication protocols are used in this
system as well. In Fig. 5, WiFi is used to transmit the
information from monitoring module to the upper layer. The
system utilized Ethernet is illustrated in Fig. 6, Fig. 7 is
designed from Zigbee.

Figure 7. Data collecting module and the transmitting module based on

Zigbee

B. Remote Monitoring Software Implementation

Based on MyEclipse, a browser is constructed for the
wireless industry monitoring system. Javascript and JSP
(JavaServer Pages) are employed in the system. Tomcat is
used as the publisher. Developed with the enterprise J2EE
(Java2 Platform), this system is tested in a simulated wireless
manufacture monitoring system. The testing system includes
different functions, such as real time display, alarm, historical
data query, data analysis, etc.
In this system, the data can be published to the browser
within two seconds. Meanwhile, the data is analyzed by the
system. Consequently, remote users could monitor the vital
data of target equipment through internet. Then remote control
Figure 5. Data collecting module and the transmitting module based on WiFi
could be achieved based on the monitoring system.

223

Figure 8. Software interface
The software interface is demonstrated in Fig.8. Four
machine tools are monitored here. It is easy to expand the
system to more machine tools.
V. CONCLUSION
A Remote Manufacturing Monitoring System Based on
sensors, RFID and network is designed in this paper, and the
monitoring system is implemented on machine tools. The
system collects data (temperature, noise, frequency, current,
voltage, rotation rate, etc) from the sensors, does data
preprocessing and fusion, and sends the data to monitoring
server periodically. The tests show that the system could
monitor machine tool status efficiently.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Foundationitems ： Project supported by the National
Natural Science Foundation,China(No.61163060) ； GuangXi
224
Sci.&Tech. Development Foundation(GKG12118017-2C),
Guilin Sci.&Tech. Development Foundation(20120104-13)，
GuangXi Key Foundation,China（No.2011GXSFD01802）,
GuangXi Key Lab of Wireless Wide Band
Communicaiton&Signal Processing.
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