LAN System for Computer Integrated Textile Manufacturing

By a massive amount of divergence demands, improved product flexibility, superior product quality and reducing delivery times today's textile industrial center is discriminating. Textile industry must organize the state-of-the-art mechanized and latest computerized management techniques to manage effectively in such a requiring and extremely competitive global market.

To control and manage the textile production, at present many plants are using monitoring systems. For a textile factory, including the departments of weaving and dyeing a latest knowledge-based monitoring and management system of a LAN (Local Area Network) computer is required. The most recent steps forward are in the area of applications of Knowledge-Based Expert System (KBES) to monitoring systems.

There are few applications available and applied in the textile industry the process of monitoring, management and planning in a textile factory are complicated tasks and the know-how for these processes is very important. Since skilled professionals are scare, this area of project activities is very prospective for those who can use Knowledge-Based Expert System (KBES) technology.

Planning and scheduling the functions in manufacturing of textile products traditional optimization tools such as linear programming have been extremely used. But, merely an algorithmic approaches for optimization, do not balance the some genuineness of the manufacturing shop floor functions. Controls are not forever linear, and the program is regularly making partial changes to contain changing product demands and convenience of resources (operators, materials and machines).To carry out the function and the resulting schedule, the individual's practice and know-how importantly affects.

For the progress or successfully operation of a KBES, while the assignment itself is fairly well identified there is a requirement of very experienced planners/candidates to complete this task. For example, processing of that task cannot be normally be set in paper in form of plan for the fabric woven and dyed to the right shade in weaving and dyeing processes, which requires professional's opinion and an adequate knowledge in that particular field. The fall out for fabric deficiency is not so clear in many cases while inspecting formed cloth rolls. Many processes in weaving, dyeing and quality control in the textile mill apply principles of uncertain logic and expert systems.

To design and construct a LAN computer system for the textile factory, including division of weaving and dyeing the network must have to flexible and can be configured in proportion to the level and same requirement. Function trail with barcode and the design of a future intelligent process management system that will efficiently apply for the distributed databases in the mill in the development of the network and hardware choices, and programming of methodologies of ISO 9000 standards are also considered, and updating the whole process and making process efficient is called the automated production (Computer Integrated Manufacturing-CIM) activities in textile weaving and dyeing processes. Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) also used in marketing, sales, engineering, materials, finance, and personal department.

Sensors, actuators, industrial robots, barcode readers/writers, microprocessors based controllers, personal computers (clients), computerized textile machines, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), material transport systems and mainframe computers (servers) are the important components of an automated textile manufacturing system. Besides communication network, it is also required to interconnect the systems, which is essential component of an automated textile manufacturing system too.

The textile production factories have some irregularity compared to common production lines such as TV or car assembly lines and are as follows:

• Forcing weaving machines to stop working, there are many reasons. It is very complex to accurately predict the time on which the product on the machine will be completed, since the time required for restarting the stopped machine relies on particular reason.
• The superiority of the product is just about related to the number of times the weaving machine clogged. In other words, the machine halt influences not only the yield but also the value of the products.
• The automatic monitoring of these machines under a LAN is not promising because there are many machines without means of communication with outside devices are used.
• Setting up of a LAN system is not considered in many factories.

The overall principles of developing a LAN system for a textile management system is provided here to see the development of the future specialist systems support on the statistical data offered by this LAN system.

There are several hierarchical monitoring and control models for CIM. The design and development of the monitoring and control system for the textile mill, the Automated Manufacturing Research Facility (AMRF) model of National Bureau of Standards (NBS) is utilized and the distinctive characteristics of the control system of the AMRF are many hierarchical levels and the sum of real-time calculation and sensory-interaction at each level and are as follows:

• Facility (factory) level: It covers process planning, production management (including long-term schedules), information management and manufacturing engineering with relations to financial and other administrative utility and this is the peak level in the ladder.
• Shop level: Organization of resources and jobs are administered on the shop floor.
• Cell level: Scheduling and controlling the jobs on production cell.
• Workstation level: Arrangement, tools tasking, take down.
• Equipment level: Planning and control hierarchy's lower level individual resources' control such as machine tools, robots, or material handling systems and connected sensors and actuators.

It can be executed at a variety of hierarchical levels because some functions are common. The functions execute at each level are understand by:

• Resource observation,
• Planning information revision,
• Necessities generation,
• Setting up of part production,
• Resource preparation (e.g., tool allocation),
• Incident origination,
• Status observation,
• Event forecast, and
• Performance assessment.

With every cell accountable for a definite function, the processes is broken down into many cells while textile fabrics process in the LAN network system like warp and sizing processes, weaving on machines, different storage and inspection points etc. For material and finished products again cells are organized by a labor-intensive moving system.

Each cell may have numerous terminals (subcells or subjobs) and each terminal may have diverse tool. The computers operating through three different servers are situated to observe production points (cells), and to gather data from each section. These servers are attached to the key server in the process management department. In semi-automatic mode by the operators the computers gathered information. For one or more than one computer workstation each PC located and the final end product of textile fabric by yarn is occupied

In the manufacturing line the yarn superiority monitoring is the first process. By the yarn storage terminal / PC the superiority of yarn and yarn storage information is modified. Then the distortion and maximizing sizing procedures are done. In the distortion process, the stop and start of the distortion machine function is carry out by hand, and the time period (machine stop) is calculated by an electronic method. When the distortion and sizing process is done then the operator using the other two workstation/PCs to updates the database.

The weaving process starts when the preprocessing for weaving procedure finished and the following operation is repeated in the weaving department:

Then, the operator discontinues the machine, cuts the cloth off, and throws it to the assessment process while a highest cloth-length is formed by a weaving machine. A semi-electronic counter or a mechanical counter is used to determine the cloth-length which verifies the rotational angle of the friction roller.

Then the next terminal/ PC set for alternate options. If the working weaving machine in the plant has the competency of match up with this computer, each machine or a group of machines can
be checked and controlled by this computer. Data are together in fact in an automatic way by this only. Or else, after each cloth roll is formed, an operator inserts the required information manually. Shifting all the position constraint to the machine, supplying the dull fabric quality characteristics and moving these data to a higher level in the network hierarchy, this PC / terminal is accountable. There are two terminal / PCs also provided to represent the quality control for the first inspection, and the gray fabric storage.

The last process in the manufacturing is the dying processes and is achieved through the quality control terminal/ PC for the second examination and the produced fabrics storage terminal / PC. In fact there are more terminals are provided in the dying department if required.

The textile LAN supervising system explained here is an isolated Ethernet set-up.
Significant pattern for this distributed structure comprise:

• Pinpointing programs and data resources circulated across the network,
• Set up and sustaining inter-program communication with the system,
• Organizing the carrying out isolated functions,
• Harmonizing simulated programs or data to uphold a steady state,
• Perceiving and getting better from fiasco in an orderly, predictable manner, and
• Protecting resources by preventive remote admission to authorized users.

To handle these varied design issues comprehensibly and equivalently co-ordination models significantly designed in one-way. For the textile mill the client/server architecture this coordination model extensively applied in distributed systems. By this model presentation of easiness in strongly in similar the stream of data and the organized flow achieved for the co-coordinating client/server organization. The model also encourages modular, flexible, and extensible system plans. Any data resource or computing process can be organized, incorporated, and approached as a service. It covers operating system task like naming and authentication, collective information resources like networked file systems and printers and applications like database engines, electronic mail, and dedicated graphic or numeric compute engines etc. Moreover according to the circumstance of clients or servers, the programs can be kept on.

These databases are well-organized on real-time by the manufacture cells with information such as working rates of weaving machines, the cost of each process, and the outcome of quality check and are associated directly to each other. Process management department gathers various kinds of data at the main server. Mostly for the product management, quality control, machine control and textile management procedure the data base acquired by the main server.

Particularly the use of KBES to work out the problem, though restrictions of this method have required the scientist to discover other practice they have placed frequently predictable data processing for a long time. It can fetch examination in accord to the unusual type of data the software developed for this system in such a way so that it can assist the professional in his/her own study. It can carry out forecast of the time required to end products, calendar new products, the cause of fabric imperfection, the examination of reason that weaving machines are required to discontinue, and so on. As an outcome it can yield a variety of information. By means of the scattered databases in the mill, various skilled structures can be built-up for this LAN-based monitoring system.

Operating under Windows NT and Windows 95, the applied network software has a countable 32-bit high-performance client/server structural design. It is designed according to the requirements by which the software will allow the InterBase, Oracle, Sybase, Informix and MS SQL Servers. Using the Delphi 2.0 Client/Server Suite the interBase database of the programs can develop accordingly too.

It can be arranged in the measure and requirement of textile manufacturing units, so the sketched LAN system will have an adaptable structure and which can combine the great extent of automation, integration and flexibility, which are key distinctiveness for automated manufacturing systems.