Machine & Process Connectivity

Most manufacturers have it – the nice dashboard in the situation room or on the tablet/mobile phone – showing beautiful production-related performance KPI’s and further figures.

To ensure the highest data integrity, a robust & stable data capturing & validation process is vital! Thus, data is captured as much as reasonable through “machine/process connectivity”.

Depending on the shop floor’s “brownfield mix” of different machine control technologies, PLC’s (or the lack of them, for that matter), the connectivity task at the “edge” can be very challenging for manufacturers.

This is where HYDRA X helps!

HYDRA’s Distributed Edge Computing Suite is the right “toolbox” with all practical connectivity solution that are adopted in today’s production field:

This begs the questions about what to do with

-?????? rather manual/mechanical processes,

-?????? “older” machine controls that do not possess any connection capability, or

-?????? “modern” machine controls where the optional connection capability might not be commercially feasible for the manufacturer.

For all of these questions, the answer is MPDV’s readily-available and pre-configured iIoT-Connector!

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Whichever connection option is chosen, it ultimately translates into automatically captured data that is validated and processed, so that it instantly turns into valuable business information for further decision making, especially in the areas of:

-?????? Machine/Production performance data (OEE, status times, output count)

-?????? Process data (pressure, temperature, vibration, etc.)

-?????? Quality (SPC) data

-?????? Energy consumption data

-?????? Others …

When it comes to data structure of such captured data, the right interpretation often depends on the individual manufacturer’s position. To further harmonize this, various industries have defined specific data conventions, for example:

-?????? EUROMAP protocols in the plastics manufacturing

-?????? UMATI companion specification for tooling machinery, on the basis of OPC UA

HYDRA X offers full flexibility and compatibility in these and other spaces.

But that is not all! Besides “capturing” of data, HYDRA X can also take on the active role of “triggering” and “sending”. In the simplest case, these are hardwired trigger signals from MPDV’s iIoT-Connector towards external actuators such as lights, buzzers or relays inside machine controls; or it could be higher sophisticated messaging via MQTT (publish & subscribe model), on the basis of information object events happening in HYDRA X at all times. This paves the way for further interoperability across production resources – old and new – potentially leading to “lights-out” production environments or simply “Dark Factories” with low human involvement in the actual floor operation.

Stay tuned about further topics in that space ….

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