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Suc­cess story: Brown­field con­nectiv­ity with umati

Chal­lenge: Trans­par­ency in a het­ero­gen­eous machine park

Our part­ner oper­ates a machine park with a wide vari­ety of man­u­fac­tur­ers, tech­no­lo­gies and years of man­u­fac­ture. Many pro­cesses are already optim­ised so that changes to the machine soft­ware are not pos­sible. Nev­er­the­less, there was a desire for a simple and cost-effect­ive solu­tion for mon­it­or­ing the status of the machines — with a focus on the OEE indic­at­ors: What is the cur­rent machine status and what was it like in the past?

Solu­tion: IoT device and umati for stand­ard­ised data points

A cost-effect­ive IoT solu­tion was developed to over­come this challenge:

  • An IoT device records the status of the oper­at­ing status light via digit­al inputs.
  • These statuses are provided via an OPC UA server.
  • As the IoT gate­way was unable to load a com­plete OPC UA Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tion, simple vari­ables were imple­men­ted that fol­low the OPC UA for Machinery (UA4M) and OPC UA for Machine Tools (UA4MT) semantics.
  • A spe­cially developed OPC UA cli­ent based on Node-RED con­verts the three states into umati-UA4MT data points.
  • The states are saved and visu­al­ised as ‘Machinery­Item­State’ and ‘Machinery­Op­er­a­tion­Mode’.
  • The UA4MT data points have been seam­lessly integ­rated into a spe­cially developed Grafana dash­board, which provides a live view of the machine status and a his­tor­ic­al dis­play of the OEE indicators.

Tech­nic­al realisation

  • Old machines
  • IoT device: W&T Web-IO 4.0
  • Node-RED
  • Grafana
  • Com­pan­ion spe­cific­a­tions OPC 40001 & OPC 40501
  • Solu­tion type: Proof of concept

Res­ult: Effi­cient data util­isa­tion in umati semantics
The solu­tion impress­ively demon­strates that even older machines without an umati inter­face can be integ­rated into a future-ori­ent­ated data environment:

  • Man­u­fac­turer-inde­pend­ent solu­tion: Stand­ard­ised data usage regard­less of the machine manufacturer.
  • Time-sav­ing data defin­i­tion: Use of the umati spe­cific­a­tion for a stand­ard­ised data structure.
  • Future-proof integ­ra­tion: New machines with umati UA4MT inter­face can be seam­lessly integ­rated into the exist­ing system.
  • Cost effi­ciency: A prag­mat­ic and eco­nom­ic­al solu­tion that optim­ally ful­fils the part­ner­’s requirements.

This proof of concept demon­strated that even older machines can provide valu­able OEE data with simple means using mod­ern umati interfaces.