The level of technology related to the automation of textile machinery has changed over the years. Indigenous efforts and the technology of machines manufactured in industrially advanced countries needs to come at par for the industry in the country to achieve a rare niche for itself.

Substantial and sustained efforts to strengthen indigenous efforts and technological backup should be made today by the major manufacturers who supply modern machines. Indian textile machinery manufacturers should able to produce at competitive prices sophisticated machines (of higher speed and production) provided technological support and economic and continuous demand is forthcoming. Microprocessorsand computers have to gain pride of place in modern machines. Most of the latest technologies in automation are to be concentrated largely on making the new version more flexible, energy efficient and perfect. Textile industry needs to be automated so as to bring self improvement with the growing sector and to produce with cost factor.

COMPUTER INTEGRATED MANUFACTURING (CIM)

The main objectives of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) are first, to provide accessible information for every sector of a plant for the efficient management of the various stages of production, second, to provide facilities for planning and control at strategic points, available for the directors, managers and supervisors to make decisions and third, to have compatible sophisticated high technology systems – particularly software – so that computers can talk to one another within the network, and modules can be linked with other modules, accepting additional work stations as the business grows.

ELEMENTS OF AN AUTOMATED TEXTILE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

Sensors, actuators, Industrial robots, Computerized textile machines, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), Material transport systems, Barcode readers/writer, Microprocessors based controllers, Personal computers (clients) and Main frame computers (servers). A textile manufacturing communication network is intended to interconnect the preceding elements. Since the subject of automated manufacturing for textile production is too broad, and the implementation also needs a perfect concentration on production planning and control whose main attributes are monitoring and control so that to reduce man power as well as with right quality goods.

TEXTILE PRODUCTION LINE PROBLEMS

As compared with general production lines such as TV or car assembly lines, the textile production factories have some peculiarities. Some of these are as follows:

• There are many causes of forcing weaving machines to stop working. Since the time necessary for restarting the stopped machine depends on the causes, it is difficult to precisely predict the time on which the product on the machine will be finished.

• The quality of the product is approximately proportional to the number of times the weaving machine stopped. In other words, the machine halt affects not only the productivity but also the quality of the products.

• There are many machines without capability of communication with external devices. Therefore the automatic monitoring of these machines under a LAN are not possible.

• The installation of a LAN system is not taken into account in many factories.

Taking these into consideration the overall principles of developing a LAN system for a textile management system is given below:

• Facility (factory) level: This is the highest level in the hierarchy, and it includes process planning, production management (including long-term schedules), manufacturing engineering, and information management, with links to financial and other administrative functions.

• Shop level: It manages the coordination of resources and jobs on the shop floor. (Task management and resource allocation).

• Cell level: Production cell control systems for scheduling and controlling the jobs. (Batch management, scheduling, dispatching).

• Workstation level: Set up, equipment tasking, take down.

• Equipment level: The lowest level of the planning and control hierarchcy, the controller for individual resources such as machine tools, robots, or material handling systems and associated sensors and actuators. (Machining, handling, monitoring). Some functions are generic enough so that they can be performed at different hierarchical levels.

The functions performed at each level include Resource monitoring, planning information update, Requirements generation, scheduling of part production, Resource planning (e.g., tool allocation), Event generation, Status monitoring, Event prediction, and Performance evaluation.

TEXTILE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND EXPERT SYSTEMS

Computer scientists have resorted to conventional data processing for a long time; however limitations of this approach have forced the scientist to explore other techniques. The software developed for this system can carry out analysis in relation to the different kinds of data so that it can help the expert in his/her own analysis.

It can perform prediction of the time needed to finish products, schedule new products, the reasons of fabric defects, the analysis of causes that weaving machines are forced to stop, and so on. It can output various kinds of reports as the results.

Different expert systems can be developed in this LAN-based monitoring system using the distributed databases in the mill.

The textile LAN monitoring system includes the following for the distribution system:

• locating programs and data resources distributed across the network,

• establishing and maintaining interprogram communication on the network,

• coordinating the execution of distributed applications,

• synchronizing replicated programs or data to maintain a consistent state,

• detecting and recovering from failures in an orderly, predictable manner, and

• securing resources by limiting remote access to authorized users.

Finally the Production management comes across with the interference with two more systems of Quality control and Produced Fabrics Storage.