electronica Nov 2014
10
Industrial PCs in the maintenance
cloud: focussing on MTBF and MTTR
By Norbert Hauser,
Kontron
Panel and Box PCs, which are
used for HMIs and control units,
should be able to connect to
maintenance clouds quickly and
reliably. This article describes
the demands that machine and
plant manufacturers should
place on such systems.
Machine and plant manufacturers as well as
operators are looking for holistic integrated
solutions for their service and maintenance
activities. According to an asset management
study by ARC Advisory Group, focus is placed
primarily on improving availability and,
therefore, the MTBF of the facilities. What’s
more, the longevity of the installations should
be increased while lowering the maintenance
costs. But that’s not all: an improvement in
quality and output, transparent management
functions (visibility to manage), and improve-
ments in relation to safety and risk manage-
ment are also motives for making investments
in this area.
An important lever here is the way in which
field service management is organized. In
order to increase efficiency, operators often
want to map the messages from signal lamps
and emergency stop switches from all over
the factory, which are usually analog signals,
on a central service cloud. Service employees
can then control systems efficiently through
the cloud using mobile devices such as smart-
phones and tablets. What’s more, new find-
ings for optimizing facilities long term can be
obtained by analyzing the collected big data.
To enable this, HMIs and controls need to
support such cloud services, as they often rep-
resent the hub between I/Os in the field and
the higher level management systems.
How can machine and plant manufacturers
develop efficient maintenance solutions and
integrate them into their box and panel PCs?
The ability to use pre-assembled solutions
would be the ideal option, especially when it
comes to collecting and providing data, estab-
lishing a connection to the service cloud and
the cloud application itself, and displaying
information. With regard to the last point,
Kontron has already introduced an exemplary
platform, which is connected to its industrial
PC within the scope of a proof-of-concept:
salesforce.com. This cloud development envi-
ronment can be used by OEMs to develop their
own in-field service solution. The convenience
of salesforce.com is that it provides a basic asset
and field service management system. Many
companies are already using the AppExchange
platform for their field service solutions and
one example is ClickWorkforce software, a
workforce management system. A user is one
of the most innovative and powerful market
participants in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for
in-field services. This proves the capabilities of
this global leader in application platforms.
How does the information from the control
unit or HMI in the field get to an application
such as salesforce.com? Kontron views the
IPC suppliers as strategic partners and has
already developed appropriate solutions for
OEMs. One development platform for con-
necting to the cloud is, for example, the M2M
Smart Services Development Kit. This can
work independently as a full cloud node or
provide the technological basis for integrated
2in1 solutions, with which the cloud access
is operated in parallel on the control or HMI
hardware - ideally in virtualised form using
a hypervisor. Developers only need to make
Salesforce data flow from
the HMI and Box PC via the
M2M platform to the Salesforce
service cloud and can be accessed
from any mobile device.
E
MBEDDED
C
OMPUTING
The IPC Kontron KBox C-101,designed for
maintenance-free “wartungsfrei” operation,
is the performance flagship of the new KBox
family for industrial control cabinets.
