The Digital Enterprise offers tremendous potential benefits for enhancing manufacturing operations and business cooperation. However, most of the manufacturing equipment in use today was not designed with the Digital Enterprise in mind. CNC machine tools, for example still use utilize “G-Codes” which were developed in the 1960s and only support primitive data constructs.
Out of necessity, multiple entities, including academia, standards organizations, and end-users have developed various techniques for tunneling more advanced data constructs and information to CNC tools through G-Codes. This approach enables a reaping of partial benefits of an automated manufacturing digital framework, uses of existing equipment, and buys time for the work of getting to direct consumption of standards formats by all parties.
This presentation will describe this approach, their benefits and liabilities, and outlines a path forward for more broader and complete implementations.

Boeing-MelissaHarvey-PragmaticImplementationsOfTheDigitalThread-CAMSC-Open