Remote supervision of production processes in the food industry

This paper presents a remote monitoring system based on the SCADA model (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition), specifically developed for automated production processes in a food company. The goals defined for this project were the monitoring of three production lines and six silos of raw materials, along with the indication / evaluation of three performance measures demanded by the company: production rate, packed quantity and OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). The developed system should also include other typical SCADA functionalities, namely alarms management, process trending and data logging. The applied methodology involved the detailed analysis of the existing automation systems, the functional specification of the remote monitoring system and the corresponding implementation (using the LabVIEW platform), test and validation. The project took about six months and the system was successfully implemented in one of the company's factories. All the objectives were achieved.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Remote maintenance support with the aid of cyber-physical systems and cloud technology

This article discusses how a business model based on traditional maintenance can evolve to generate servitization strategies, with the help of remote maintenance support. The application of cyber-physical systems and cloud technologies play a key role for such maintenance purposes. In fact, the utilization of large quantities of data collected on machines and their processing by means of advanced techniques such as machine learning enable novel techniques for condition-based maintenance. New sensor solutions that could be used in maintenance and interaction with cyber-physical systems are also presented. Here, data models are an important part of these techniques because of the huge amounts of data that are produced and should be processed. These data models have been used in a real case, supported by the Machinery Information Management Open System Alliance Open System Architecture for Condition-Based Maintenance standard architecture, for streamlining the modeling of collected data. In this context, an industrial use case is described, to enlighten the application of the presented concepts in a working pilot. Finally, current and future directions for application of cyber-physical systems and cloud technologies to maintenance are discussed

Instantiating the PERFORM system architecture for industrial case studies

The PERFoRM project, an innovation action promoted within the scope of the EU Horizon 2020 program, advocates the use of an Industrie 4.0 compliant system architecture for the seamless reconfiguration of robots and machinery. The system architecture re-uses the innovative results from previous successful R & D projects on distributed control systems domain, such as SOCRADES, IMC-AESOP, GRACE and IDEAS. This paper, after describing the main pillars of the PERFoRM system architecture, focuses on mapping the system architecture into four industrial use cases aiming to validate the system architecture design before its deployment in the real environments.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

High tech automated bottling process for small to medium scale enterprises using PLC, scada and basic industry 4.0 concepts

The automation of industrial processes has been one of the greatest innovations in the industrial sector. It allows faster and accurate operations of production processes while producing more outputs than old manual production techniques. In the beverage industry, this innovation was also well embraced, especially to improve its bottling processes. However it has been proven that a continuous optimization of automation techniques using advanced and current trend of automation is the only way industrial companies will survive in a very competitive market. This becomes more challenging for small to medium scale enterprises (SMEs) which are not always keen in adopting new technologies by fear of overspending their little revenues. By doing so, SMEs are exposing themselves to limited growth and vulnerable lifecycle in this fast growing automation world. The main contribution of this study was to develop practical and affordable applications that will optimize the bottling process of a SME beverage plant by combining its existing production resources to basic principles of the current trend of automation, Industry 4.0 (I40). This research enabled the small beverage industry to achieve higher production rate, better delivery time and easy access of plant information through production forecast using linear regression, predictive maintenance using speed vibration sensor and decentralization of production monitoring via cloud applications. The existing plant Siemens S7-1200 programmable logic controller (PLC) and ZENON supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system were used to program the optimized process with very few additional resources. This study also opened doors for automation in SMEs, in general, to use I40 in their production processes with available means and limited cost.School of ComputingM.Tech (Engineering, Electrical

Viable system architecture applied to maintenance 4.0

Câmara, R. A., Mamede, H. S., & Dos Santos, V. D. (2019). Viable system architecture applied to maintenance 4.0. In A. P. Abraham, J. Roth, & L. Rodrigues (Eds.), Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, MCCSIS 2019 - Proceedings of the International Conferences on Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence 2019 and Theory and Practice in Modern Computing 2019 (pp. 127-134). (Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, MCCSIS 2019 - Proceedings of the International Conferences on Big Data Analytics, Data Mining and Computational Intelligence 2019 and Theory and Practice in Modern Computing 2019). IADIS Press.Disruptive requirements that currently drive the so-called Industry 4.0 (I4.0) are increasingly present in today's industries, where factories are forced to innovate in search of improvement in the quality of manufacturing of products aligned with the reductions of: manufacturing time, environmental and cost impacts with the manufacturing process. For this, an Information Systems (IS) architecture is proposed to reduce the negative impacts on an industrial operation caused by manual configuration failures in manufacturing systems, machines that are worn out in the production process and unstable integrations between industrial subsystems. The suggested SI model uses the Viable Systems Model adapted to Maintenance 4.0 technologies (Cyber-physical Systems (CPS), Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Data Mining and Digital Manufacturing concepts/technologies) with the goal to create an automatic purchase flow to replace parts by mitigating impending failures in industrial equipment through data mining and predictive analysis.publishersversionpublishe

Benchmarking VisualStudio.NET for the development and implementation of a manufacturing execution system

The focus of this thesis is to show the utility of Microsoft\u27s\u27 .NET framework in developing and implementing a MES system. The manufacturing environment today, more than ever, is working towards achieving better yields, productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction. Companies such as DELL are rapidly outgrowing their competition due to better management of their product lifecycles. The time between receiving a new order to the time the final product is shipped is getting shorter. Historically, business management applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have been implemented without too much importance given to the operational and shop floor needs. The fact is that these business systems can be successful only when they are properly integrated with real-time data from the shop floor, which is the core of any manufacturing set-up. A Manufacturing Execution System or a MES is this link between the shop floor and the top floor. MESA international defines MES as Systems that deliver information enabling the optimization of production activities from order launch to finished goods Thus, a MES provides the right information to the right people at the right time in a right format, to help them make well-informed decisions. Thus, a necessity for an efficient MES is high capability of integration with the existing systems on the operational level. This is where Microsoft\u27s\u27 VS.NET fits in. Microsoft defines .NET as A set of software technologies for connecting information, people, systems and devices . The vision of .NET is to enable the end user to connect to information from any place at anytime, using any device and in a manner that is independent of the platform on which the service is based. The building block of the .NET framework is the Common Language Runtime or CLR, which is capable of converting data from its original format into a format understandable to .NET and then use that format to interface with its client. This feature that .NET provides holds the key in the context of a MES development and implementation. The aim of this applied research is to design a MES using VS.NET to control the working of a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) namely CAMCELL. The architecture used for the MES will then be gauged against an MES implementation done previously using a Siemens\u27 PC-based automation technology and Visual FoxPro. This study will integrate the Siemens\u27 technology with the .NET framework to enhance the resulting MES efficiency. The shop floor details or the real-time data collection will be done using the databases from WinCC and data aggregation and manipulation will be done within the .NET framework. The software architecture used for this study will achieve vertical integration between the CAMCELL ERP layer, the MES layer and the Control layer. The study will demonstrate how the data stored in a high level ERP database can be converted into useful information for the control layer for process control and also how real-time information gathered from the control layer can be filtered into useful information up to the ERP layer to facilitate the decision making process. VS.NET user interface screens will be proposed to support these activities. The performance of the proposed architecture will be compared to that from previous studies, thus benchmarking VS.NET for the implementation of the MES

Recent Developments in Quality Management in the Era of Digital Transformation – A Review

The purpose of the current exploratory research is to trace the growth and evolution of the Quality Management as a critical function in organizations and as a discipline of study in academia and research. The methodology adapted is to review some of the classical works and research in the area of Quality Management, which indicates direction of growth and evolution. There are several pioneers who have contributed richly for building and shaping the Quality Management principles, practices and methodologies over several decades. The current study involved the task of summarizing significant trends of Quality Management starting from the crafts man era and going up to the current trend of managing Quality as part of digital transformation. In the digital era there is an increased emphasis on automation of all the activities related to product and process quality management. The use of IoT based automation starting from data capturing, archiving and the point of self-diagnostic and autonomous way of managing quality issues is common place in today’s industries Quality 4.0 era. There are several challenges along the way for which quality professionals must be equipped in terms of knowledge, skills and attitude necessary for quality problem solving using modern techniques. This aspect is also researched in this study. Familiarity with technology platforms such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, image processing, sensors and actuators and such other emerging technologies must form the arsenal for analyzing data and data patterns in the face of data deluge. This requires several inter and multi-disciplinary knowledge exchange forums for grooming future quality professional. This article aims at tracing the metamorphosis of quality management with focus on people development and continuous process improvements in the manufacturing and allied sectors

Production Scheduling in Copper Electrorefining and Electrowinning Plants with Manufacturing Execution Systems

Copper electrolysis process is used to produce pure, over 99.99% copper with the help of electricity. Production dispatching and scheduling in copper electrolysis processes have been done mostly manually and without direct link to automation systems. Disruptions in the production processes usually require new decisions from production planners and changes to production schedules. Manual transfer of information is prone to errors and the transfer process usually takes longer time. In copper electrolysis production scheduling is put into practice by controlling the cranes, which are handling all the material transfers in the plant. One of the objectives of this thesis was to research how to implement new production dispatching features to the existing manufacturing execution system. Theoretical part of this thesis consists of introduction of suitable technologies and standards that could be considered as basis for the empirical research. The foundation for a fully automatic production scheduling and dispatching is a reliable communication between the manufacturing execution system and the automation system. This thesis work contains a review of multiple standards and ready-made commercial products that support these dispatching operations. The empirical part of this thesis consists of design, implementation and testing of a daily production schedule software for cranes. The implementation includes communication and data collection infrastructure but all user interface components are out the scope of this thesis. Also the high level fully automatic scheduling workflow was designed in a high level but was not implemented during this project. This implementation leveraged new products in the field of software technology. Suitability of these products for this and similar projects were evaluated. Most of the problems faced during the implementation were related to a commercial software platform selected for the implementation. Therefore it was suggested that the further use of the commercial product will be put on hold until these problems get fixed by possible software updates. Further development is related to the fully automatic scheduling and also for the development of the user interface