Implementing Manufacturing Message Specifications (MMS) within collaborative virtual environments over the Internet

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology that has many potential applications in manufacturing. Networked or shared virtual environments (VE) are of growing interest in modern manufacturing, which is making increasing use of virtual reality technology. An important feature of networked VEs is the way in which they control and share 3D information, and the support of this by real-time data transfer. The bottleneck of transferring 3D data in real-time between networked VEs is the performance of networking protocols. This paper proposes a novel approach to implementing the Manufacturing Message Specifications (MMS), an ISO/IEC 9506 communication standard and presents a Manufacturing Message Transfer Protocol (MMTP), suitable for a broad range of Internet-based VE communication applications - in particular, virtual manufacturing collaborative design and control. An Internet communication system is described that can support networked virtual manufacturing environments within the framework of the Manufacturing Message Specifications (MMS) Standard.