As industrial users and OEMs need more programmers and automation engineers, the levels of experience in available engineers declines, and the demand for reduced time-to-market increases, industrial software systems must be more intuitive and easy-to-use. That was the demand of a major Italian wine producer with a capacity of 300,000 bottles per day on three production lines. The company had a self-developed application designed to manage services and technical rooms in the production plant and monitor and control the status of the plant’s three production lines. When the company tested Emerson’s Movicon SCADA software, it was the intuitive ease-of-use as well as the efficiency of the system that sealed the deal.
The system’s architecture is comprised of a Movicon server, two clients and one web client. The two clients from which all the project’s pages can be accessed once logging on with a password, are located in the maintenance manager’s and the production manager’s offices. The web client is used as a wildcard since access can be gained from any personal computer or device using a browser. The project is unique and covers the two maintenance and production departments where both the two clients have been installed.
The maintenance section has been designed to constantly control and emit alarm and malfunction notifications of the company’s various technical systems which include: internal and external cooling systems, air compressors, central water supply, heating system, purifier, vapor filtration, and oil-free air systems. The cellar lights can be controlled manually or according to a predefined schedule. Each page in this section contains a graphic screen page representing each system and its operating status. Another window is active at all times to show events and eventual alarms so that prompt interaction can be taken to ensure that the product quality is kept up to standard and the whole process continues smoothly in the right direction. With the aid of the real-time trend and historical trend, it is possible to analyze event behavior and any probable causes of exceeded alarm and temperature thresholds. Some technical forms have been created to control and monitor the status of maintenance and the operating times of compressors and other devices used in various areas of the plant. By means of using these technical forms it is possible to control operating times day-by-day or by specific time ranges, view periods of inactivity, calculate averages and manage the necessary maintenance.
The supervisory pages of the various technical rooms are protected by passwords and are used to set the system’s alarm intervention thresholds such as when water exceeds the set minimum or maximum water tank level. When thresholds are exceeded, an alarm will show onscreen and an alert will be sounded by means of an audio system installed in the maintenance office. As the system to heat water is more complex than the others, an ad hoc screen page was created by means of which quick intervention can be made on the various bypasses and valves that control the vapor and circulation of the water. The switching off and on of lights in the cellar and their brightness can be programmed using a calendar scheduler. The lights can be regulated and programmed differently for each hour of the day and controlled automatically. They can also be controlled manually by excluding the use of the scheduler.
The production supervisory system controls productivity efficiency and the state of the three bottling lines. The home page shows the general situation of the three production lines by using a pie chart to show whether they are running at full capacity, not running, or OFF. It also shows the number of bottles that have passed through from the filling machine to the labelling machine. On this page, like all the others, alarms are displayed and controlled in real-time with the possibility to access the various pages dedicated to each of the technical rooms. Selecting one of the three production lines will provide instant access to another page showing all the production line’s values that reveal how efficiently the machine has been operating.
The same production line is also displayed using simple and effective graphics that allow operators to keep track of how each machine in the production is running. The machines used in the production line are: depalletizer, filling machine, pasteurizer, labelling machine, packaging machine, and palletizer, and each is equipped to provide data of its own productivity. This page is also used to consult real-time and historical production charts, set specific parameters such as the conveyor belt speed, consult various piece counts and manage alarms if they occur. A detailed page has been created for each machine so that if you access the filling machine page, for example, you will be able to see how many bottles have been filled, broken or rejected in a certain period of time or batch selectable with the aid of using filters. The page dedicated to the pasteurizer machine is used to change the process variables that control the temperatures and processing times. A window with a real-time trend showing these values remains active at all times. All of the following can be controlled from the two offices in which the Movicon Clients are installed: parameters, temperatures, margin of error, alarms and anomalies, production and productivity. This type of overall supervision is a highly reliable way to obtain productivity efficiency that would otherwise be impossible to achieve with a normal control system.
Ultimately, the final results of the system design and implementation met the demands put forward by the company. These demands included non-stop control of maintenance, alarms and anomaly in such a way as to allow prompt intervention when needed. Plus, it provides production quality control in real time with historical data consultation to allow prompt intervention to manage machine parameters accurately and to enable traceability of the person responsible.
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