To assure a constant and high quality level of e.g. milled products, it is beneficial to have information about the condition of the tool’s cutting edge at every point in time during the production process. Therefore, the tool load components most relevant to tool degradation are continuously monitored throughout the process.

The goal of this so-called "Tool Health Monitoring" is to develop a smart machine tool that provides its operator with real-time information on significant changes in the process and the damage state of the used tools. In this way, the maximum tolerable tool loads and the optimal tool exchange intervals can be identified in a knowledge-based manner.

A prerequisite to the interpretation of production process data patterns requires a link to their physical cause. This in turn requires a close cooperation between tooling experts and data analysts. To this end, MCL’s expertise in the field of tool damage mechanisms and simulation is combined with the know-how of the Institute of Automation of the Montanuniversität Leoben with regard to analysis of large amounts of data as they are collected in very long instrumented experiments.