Weaving Loom Integration in Textile Enterprise

Weaving technique represents the development of textile industry. After 25 years of open gate and reform of industry construction, textile manufacturing in China has been developed to a higher level. China had imported many modern weaving machines from Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, and other countries. The domestic textile machine manufacturers and research institutes developed and manufactured many kinds of shuttleless looms. According to the statistical calculation, the total number of shuttleless looms is more than shuttle looms in use in China currently [1]. The wide use of the shuttleless loom demonstrates a strong technical support to the modernization of textile industry in China. These kind of shuttleless looms are equipped with advanced mechanisms like electronic let-off motion, electronic shedding motion, computer based monitoring, electronic dobby and jacquard machine. They are modern textile machines. Due to the labor denseness of the textile industry and unbalanced development of information technology (IT) in China, the manufacturing organization mode of textile is still old fashioned. Modern machines did not get the most economic and technical benefits. This situation was called “Automation Island”. In this paper, the author will describe his research in the integration of weaving machines through a local net. In the author’s project, which is being supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang in China, a research team tries to reform the original computer-based loom controller. The required hardware modification and software programming was added. All looms of the workshop were linked to a central control computer through PROFIBUS to make a local net. Now weaving information of every single loom can be monitored through this central computer. Weaving machine integration is very important textile enterprises. There are a lot of applications using this technology. Web-based (mass customization, MC) customized produce is the future of advanced manufacture. An integrated workshop is a good platform for the enterprisers to expose their business to worldwide market. In this article, the author will discuss effort in this area, including experiments and results.