FEATURED ARTICLE

Data From Packaging to the Company

Company managers are desperate for data from the factory that will let their enterprise resource planning systems fulfill the promises made when they authorized the information technology departments to implement them.

Without actual data derived directly from sensors and controllers in the plant, managers cannot trust information presented to them to support decision making.

Standards are one of the keys to getting these data flowing. As I write this, I’m in an airport on my way to a meeting of the Open Modular Architecture Control Users Group (OMAC). At this meeting, OMAC leaders hope to get people from the process manufacturing side and the discrete manufacturing side talking about integrating standards for modeling and communicating factory information. Standards such as the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society’s ISA88 and ISA95 have helped engineers and other professionals model batch processing and enterprise information integration respectively. The packaging workgroup of OMAC has extended the ISA88 model to packaging equipment. A working group of the SP88 committee is working on Part 5 of the standard that would bring these gains into the official standards world... Read more

Breaching Boundaries - The folks pushing OMAC and OPC-UA are ready to shift the focus of packaging automation from devices to data.

Las Vegas is no stranger to high-stakes games, but arguably one of the highest-stakes contests of recent times occurred when the OMAC Packaging Workgroup (OPW) and the OPC Foundation teamed up with technology suppliers Acumence, B&R, Beckhoff, Elau, GE Fanuc, Iconics, Kepware, Siemens and Wago for an integrated packaging line demonstration during PackExpo 2007 Oct. 15-18.

Years of effort and a fortune in development costs were on the line as the technology vendors who have backed OMAC and OPC’s efforts sought to show that packaging-line functions such as control, human-machine interface (HMI), manufacturing execution systems (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) could be linked using the OPW Connect-and-Pack guidelines employing OPC (a communications standard) over Ethernet. It was, by all accounts, successful, though interpretations as to the degree of success vary... Read more

Optimizing Wireless Diagnostics with OPC - Wireless communication is becoming increasingly popular for factory and process control automation systems.

Part of this growth, says Jim Ralston, wireless sales engineer for ProSoft Technology Inc., Bakersfield, Calif., is due to the emergence of reliable radio frequency (RF) technologies capable of operating consistently in harsh industrial environments. But as more systems become dependant on wireless networks, it is important to include intelligent diagnostics to detect network degradation and prevent communication failures before they occur.

Ralston notes that diagnostic techniques vary greatly by industrial wireless manufacturer. There are some “industrial” wireless devices that do not include any diagnostic information at all. Either the data is received correctly or not. These are understandably very difficult to troubleshoot when problems are encountered. Other systems provide off-line diagnostics, for which communication must be stopped in order to access the diagnostic information. These systems at least provide some insight into the cause, but only after a failure has occurred, Ralston observes... Read more

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