MTConnect Institute Releases MTConnect Standard Version 1.5.0

The MTConnect Institute, standard development organization for MTConnect, announces the release of Version 1.5.0 of the MTConnect standard, a free, open semantic vocabulary for discrete manufacturing. This version includes new data items and information models for additive manufacturing including material system, deposition system, volumetric units, wait states and new data items for robotic machine tending including part detect. It features expanded data items for machine tools including variables, program nesting level, program source, streaming variables, native units and expanded data items for cutting tools including tool offset variable and tool group. There are also new data items and information models for complex manufacturing systems including relationships and new event type references by device ID, as well as bug fixes and editorial corrections.

The standard is produced and maintained by volunteers from industry via the MTConnect Institute Standards Committee and its working groups. A free, open-source, community-maintained MTConnect agent written in C++ is available at https://github.com/mtconnect/cppagent and includes version 1.5 updates and the version 1.5 XML schema. In addition to new data items, version 1.5 also saw the foundation laid for publishing a SysML model to accompany future releases. That model is a work-in-progress and available at https://github.com/mtconnect/mtconnect-sysml-model.