Smart Manufacturing Connectivity for Brown-field Sensors Testbed
least from today ’ s perspective , the incorporation of communication capabilities in every sensor is too expensive . Furthermore , in terms of size , many sensors need to be very small to be incorporated into the appropriate locations at the machines and thus cannot be equipped with a receiver .
This testbed suggests using option 2 to extract data from the first aggregation level and to transfer that data through an additional communication path to the enterprise IT system without impacting the real-time operations .
The architecture proposed by this testbed can also be applied if there is a modern PLC and if it is beneficial to extract data close to the sensors , e . g ., to reduce the traffic on the Industrial Ethernet system . However , modern PLCs are definitely suitable to process the required amount of data and many PLC suppliers offer modules with integrated OPC UA servers . So , with a modern PLC available , users would likely select option 3 above .
Another objective of the Testbed was to provide a retrofit solution for the factory floor . Many older machines are delivered without sensors integrated for diagnosis purposes . Thus , there is a distinct potential of increasing the Overall Equipment Effectiveness ( OEE ) by adding sensors and running machine learning algorithms .
Machine learning and advanced analytics are currently not used in the Testbed . Simple monitoring and analytics applications were used within the validation usage scenario , but it was not the focus of the Testbed . Nonetheless , this could be a point of connection with additional IIC members to perform advanced analytics on the Testbed .
Elements of the Technical Solution
This testbed introduced a special IO module which connects up to 8 IO-Link sensors and which provides interfaces to the real-time control system ( Industrial Ethernet ) and the enterprise IT system ( TCP / IP ) at the same time and that is why the name “ Y-Gateway ” is used for it . The Y-Gateway is a retrofit-able hardware solution intended to substitute classical IO modules where data with relevance for higher-level processes are passing through . This approach creates a new proponent suitable for brown-field installations ; namely , extracting data from where it is actually generated while the original system architecture is preserved . Existing cabling can be re-used .
The Y-Gateway implements computational and storage capabilities and is thus able to perform some pre-processing of data from the eight IO-Link sensors and to buffer data for later bulk retrieval if required by the application .
There are some estimations that only about 5 % of the sensor data are actually used by the governing PLC for running the automation task . As explained above , elder PLC are typically not suitable to process more than that , so the Testbed ’ s sensor-tothe-cloud approach enhances the data availability for brown-field installations by up to a factor of 20 . This higher quantity of data is especially interesting when considering to implement machine learning algorithms at enterprise IT level that require a higher volume of training data prior to actually running real-time analysis tasks .
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