Investigation of the Impacts of Standardisation and Data Handling within the Machine tool Service Environment

The advance of modern machine tools has created the situation where the traditional approaches to machine tool measurement and reporting are beginning to fall short. Due to the large number of measurements required to fully qualify a complex machine tool, along with ever-tightening time constraints, it is extremely important to understand what the end goals are before any measurements are taken. Existing methods of determining what errors are present in a machine tool, i.e. through the manual assessment of the machine tool configuration, are both time consuming and susceptible to human errors. The combination of this increased complex with the vastly increased quantity of data recorded by modern measurement and calibration equipment has led to large amounts of human resources being required to process and record it. Worse than this, it has led to captured data being underutilised and opportunities for improvement being missed.

A system that can automatically produce a comprehensive list of the errors that are present within a machine tool would save valuable time. Additional benefits would include the development of a common language for describing and storing machine tool configuration, along with a consistent database, both of which would dramatically increase the efficiency of the search and recall activities. The information to develop such a system was collected during the course of this research in a partnership with a leading industrial partner.