Service-oriented invisible numerical control application: architecture, implementation, and test

CNC system has improved greatly upon machining precision and speed over the past six decades but remains vendor-proprietary and working in a stand-alone pattern. Open CNC aims to deal with the vendor-proprietary issue and numerous open CNC prototypes have been developed in the past three decades. But they are heterogeneous, low-flexible, and remain working in a stand-alone pattern. In today's Internet era, the stand-alone working pattern tends to evolve into cloud-based control pattern (cloud-CNC). On the basis of open CNC and cloud-CNC, our team proposes a novel CNC prototype called Invisible Numerical Control (INC). This paper aims to develop the INC application within the constraints of open CNC and cloud-CNC. Service-oriented paradigm is utilised to develop INC application at three levels. First, INC application is a software-as-a-service-style application. Second, CNC modules are exposed as services and CNC functionality is determined by service-oriented architecture. Third, INC application is developed using microservices architecture. Four autonomous INC microservices are defined and their mapping relationships are determined. All INC microservices are implemented as RESTful services and two complex INC microservices are implemented based on domain-driven design. A desktop client and its corresponding API gateway have been developed to test INC application.