SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PROVIDING VIRTUAL ONLINE ENGINEERING OF A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT

A system and method of provide real-time monitoring and control of a production environment. Manufacturing equipment having proprietary or non-standard digital interfaces provide a plurality of data streams having incompatible communication protocols that are converted to a common communication protocol by a translator and aggregated on a local area network. The resulting aggregated data stream is transmitted across an open network such as the internet or via a wide area network to a remote network. Virtual remote engineering of the production environment is possible from the remote network through monitoring, analysis and control of the production environment.