Improving fault diagnosis and accessibility in Manufacturing automation systems using X3DOM

Today industry has to face the demands of products at lower cost and reduced time-to-market in a global market environment. Solutions require the application with new and innovative technologies to efficiently achieve the desirable functional capabilities. The benefits of Virtual Engineering environments are becoming noticeable at product and process development level but its visualisation has not been applied much at a shop-floor level. Using an automation toolset utilising a component based approach, this paper introduces a Web-based 3D fault diagnosis and its visualisation in a shop-floor that delivers better perception and understanding to engineers, and even provides convenient shop floor accessibility to machine information anytime and anywhere. In particular, this work has implemented 3D fault visualisation using an X3DOM model and technology. It improves the accessibility of 3D visualisation without the need for specific visualisation software and can be deployed on both PC-based hardware and mobile devices.