Wouldn''t it be nice to use everyday conveniences -- cell phones, PDAs, even MP3 players -- to make your life easier and more manageable on the factory floor?
Manufacturers around the world are already using a wide range of these commercial technologies. And why not? These devices were originally designed for people on the go. With 24/7 manufacturing schedules, many plant floor engineers can now leave the office, and remain on top of issues as they arise.
Commercial Technologies Go Industrial
Consider the PDA. Most people use their PDAs to keep track of their calendar, contacts, and email. On the plant floor, the same device can store custom programs or applications that help personnel perform certain tasks, such as preventative maintenance or troubleshooting. The portability of a PDA means employees are not tethered to a stationary piece of equipment; they can move freely around the machine or throughout the plant. A PDA can provide access to an entire library of manuals and drawings, saving valuable time that would have been spent searching through hundreds of hard copy pages, which can minimize or eliminate costly downtime.
Standard mobile phones, meanwhile, are expanding their capabilities. For example, they can be used by commuters in several countries to identify and pay their parking fees. All it takes is a short text message to a parking operator to open a virtual account. When the commuter prepares to leave, he or she simply calls a predetermined telephone number to check total duration and account balance. With advances in GPS-enabled mobile phones, commuters in some countries are able to use the same service to find the quickest way to their parking spot, avoiding traffic jams and construction detours.
The same technology used in mobile phones is now being employed on the factory floor to boost response times, provide early notification of impending failures, and make changes to equipment configurations from remote locations. As wireless technology standards continue to develop and become more robust, manufacturers will have greater flexibility in how they deploy their equipment and people. Reducing the amount of factory floor wiring not only cuts costs but also reduces installation and configuration time and allows users to move equipment throughout the facility with greater ease and flexibility. For companies adopting lean manufacturing practices, this is just the kind of efficient communication needed. While we have yet to see the full impact of commercial technologies on the plant floor, the lapse in time between the invention of commercial tools and their adoption in the manufacturing environment is shrinking rapidly.
Open Architectures Are Key
A major enabler in leveraging these commercial technologies is the increased use of standard, open networking architectures. Standard industrial Ethernet provides the ideal medium to mix commercial, business, and industrial applications on a single network. It is safe to say that TCP/IP is now the dominant protocol running on Ethernet networks on the factory floor. A typical installed Ethernet-TCP/IP network today may extend plant-wide, and be connected to a corporation''s worldwide network via the Internet. It is generally used to conduct program maintenance, send data to and from MIS and MES systems, perform Supervisory Control, provide connectivity for Operator Interfaces, and log events and alarms. More and more, Ethernet is being used as the real-time control network as well, connecting drives, I/O, robots, and controllers in addition to handling the traditional tasks mentioned earlier. These functions require the high throughput and widespread accessibility that Ethernet offers.
Choosing the Right Protocol
The key to using Ethernet effectively for all of these tasks requires the choice of a real-time, industrial protocol that can work side-by-side with the many commercial protocols for web, email, etc. Further, this real-time protocol must use standard, unmodified Ethernet TCP/IP/UDP rather than bypass it. This key enables users to deploy Ethernet as they have in the past, using standard network products, standard infrastructure, and leveraging the decades of training and experience the world has gained from using Ethernet in business and commercial settings. While several versions of industrial Ethernet protocols exist in the market, only a few have delivered on this requirement, including EtherNet/IP backed by ODVA and Modbus-TCP supported by IDA.
When plants employ standard industrial network protocols, such as EtherNet/IP -- the front-runner of all the industrial Ethernet solutions with over 1 million nodes installed worldwide -- the location of data becomes irrelevant. It doesn''t matter if it''s in the business-level accounting system, an engineering database, or halfway across the world, because the data is accessible anywhere, anytime you have a network connection.
Expanding Possibilities
As commercial technologies and standard-compliant networks continue to penetrate the factory floor, the range of possibilities for the manufacturing world continues to expand. There''s the plant engineer who knows he can leave work at the same time every day, because the shift''s production data will be emailed to his phone. After dinner with his family, he can review the data, forward it on for reporting purposes, and make recommendations for the next shift.
The same is true for maintenance efficiencies -- rather than waiting for a machine to break down and then call maintenance, the machine can send its own text message to a maintenance technician, letting them know that a system failure will happen in the next three hours.
Faster response times, reduced downtime, and improved decision-making ability . . . it may all seem like light years away, but many progressive companies are already realizing the cost and labor benefits that these cutting-edge technologies can deliver today.