INDUSTRY FOCUS Food & Beverage y
Mobile HMIs for effi cient plant operations
Rich Carpenter, machine automation solutions product manager at Emerson, explains how mobile HMIs are empowering the ongoing convergence of operations and maintenance
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raditional manufacturing plants have one or more control rooms staff ed by operators who monitor the status of all systems and equipment, issuing commands and addressing alerts as needed. Most production sites also have maintenance personnel who can respond to issues on the plant fl oor, take appropriate actions and report results back to the control room. It is essential that operators and maintenance engineers work together to resolve issues quickly. However, coordinating actions between these two departments can be challenging. Driven by the quest for improvements in plant performance, a more modern, eff ective and effi cient approach is needed. This requires operations and maintenance personnel to perform dual roles (maintenance and operator) with some overlapping of responsibilities. Supporting this transformation are mobile human machine interface (HMI) technologies, which off er convenience and functionality, improving operating effi ciency through close collaboration between operations and maintenance personnel.
Conventional control-room operators usually work at fi xed PC-based HMIs, although there may often be other HMI devices, ranging from pushbuttons to smaller displays, typically installed on or near a machine or piece of equipment. When operators receive an alert or identify an issue, they typically contact a member of the maintenance department, who will go out into the fi eld to resolve the problem. The operator will remain at their workstation, perhaps communicating with maintenance personnel via radio. Although a tried-and-trusted approach, it is cumbersome, introduces delays and can create errors.
IT/OT convergence The convergence of information technologies (IT) with plant-fl oor operational technologies (OT) increases as IT-based hardware, software, networking and protocols become integrated and more
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compatible with OT hardware, such as PLCs and HMIs. Historically these devices have been much more specialised, with dedicated tasks. More recently, IT/OT convergence has brought a wide range of advanced mobile HMIs to the market, with the key requirement of device durability and performance. Within some facilities, standard mobile phones can be used for specifi c HMI functions, often permitting employees to access read-only data on their own devices. Other applications require site-specifi c or industrially-hardened tablets, confi gured to permit monitoring and control activities. Whatever the type of mobile HMI device, the result is that operators are no longer tied to the control room, and more information is available to maintenance personnel on the plant fl oor or in the fi eld. One example of improved mobile HMIs is the latest OT controllers, which not only include traditional PLC control, but now feature PC-like computing abilities. Advanced processing, such as real-time analytics, can now be provided by the PLC, without disruption to the basic automation functions. The latest PLCs can even serve graphics directly to mobile devices, maximising plant effi ciency.
Food and beverage applications Like many manufacturing plants, food and beverage production facilities have a distributed mix of equipment that can benefi t from mobile HMIs. Diff erent
sections of the plant, such as storage, processing, blending, fi lling and bottling, use predominantly standalone equipment and systems. Automation technology and programming for each system are usually provided by diff erent specialist vendors and machine builders.
Despite this, the disparate systems may connect to an HMI application in a central control room for monitoring, alarming, setpoint/recipe settings and control commands. Should an issue arise, such as a bottling line backlog, it can be diffi cult to determine the root cause from the control room. An operator or maintenance person will likely inspect the production line or machine to discover what is wrong. Using mobile HMI, operators and maintenance personnel can correlate the HMI-supplied information with the actual situation they can see in front of them. Operators can determine if a production stoppage is due to a simple blockage of bottles that they can correct, or if the problem is more serious and requires maintenance support.
By combining mobile HMIs with a
fi rst-hand perspective, both operators and maintenance personnel become more eff ective because the time between recognising and resolving problems is minimised.
CONTACT:
Emerson
www.emerson.com/industrial-automation-controls
Automation | November 2020
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