electronica Nov 2014
18
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tially slower speeds. To improve product qual-
ity they would need to focus on integration
speed and ease of collecting data. The origi-
nal 2001 IT implementation included a large
Java-based MES tracking application built on
a UNIX platform. It was a custom-developed
equipment interface written in house to meet
business needs. The solution worked well but
was difficult to maintain; additional custom-
ization was required each time a new device
was introduced. An OPC-based solution was
added but it fell short of delivering the desired
improvements in resource utilization. The logic
and application integration was still written by
Honda, the response time was slow, there was
data buildup in transit, and the team still had
to deal with configuration issues. To reduce
custom code and integration, Honda deployed
the deviceWISE industrial automation plat-
form. Originally developed to operate within
the four walls of the enterprise, it connects and
integrates production machines and processes
with existing enterprise resource planning
(ERP) and manufacturing resource planning
(MRP) systems and SCADA applications.
DeviceWISE runs on multiple platforms (Win-
dows, Linux, AIX, etc.), uses simple configu-
ration logic and is fully-featured for advanced
industrial automation. By adding deviceWISE,
Honda was able to bring their blended system
– the custom and the OPC package – into one
common, simple interface.
The deviceWISE solution met the Honda
requirement for a flexible and scalable system
to suit the architecture of each plant. Plant
floor IT managers needed to drive decision
making by staying flexible within all lay-
ers of the application architecture, not from
just inside their apps but from the factory
floor side as well. Scalability meant support-
ing large factory implementations with large
UNIX systems as well as small factory imple-
mentations with medium Linux systems. It
also meant supporting special situations, e.g.
satellite operations, with unique equipment or
suppliers.
For large plants deviceWISE provided cen-
tralized control with options for satellite sys-
tems for localized logic and data reduction.
Honda could run deviceWISE locally or com-
municate back up to the enterprise inside
their data center and back to the factory floor.
They could collect data downstream and have
nested information or nested devices below
that, thereby creating a small, common archi-
tecture and then feeding the data up to the
enterprise into the large systems such as the
ERP system or MES systems.
Finally, the deviceWISE platform met the
requirement to improve data quality. The
original plant tools couldn’t handle the larger
data sets sent from newer, more intelligent
production devices with faster scan rate capa-
bility. For example, the history of a part serial
number had to be retained in the PLCs. Add-
ing more data to the PLCs slowed the over-
all scan times, which could lead to missing
data. Implementing the deviceWISE solution
enabled Honda to: simplify the plant device
configuration, make the complex business
logic that was buried in the application avail-
able to the plant device, remove complex lad-
der logic, and utilize a cheaper platform to
write logic. It also meant using the enterprise
to store and search the larger data set while
not impacting the PLC scan rate and improv-
ing performance.
Data transfer between production assets and enterprise systems
Hall.Stand A5.507
Artesyn joins Wind River
Titanium Cloud ecosystem
Artesyn Embedded Technologies has joined
the Wind River Titanium Cloud ecosystem, a
program dedicated to accelerating the devel-
opment of solutions for network functions
virtualization. By pre-integrating and vali-
dating hardware and software products with
Wind River Titanium Server, the Titanium
Cloud members shorten time-to-market for
service providers and telecom equipment
manufacturers
deploying
infrastructure
based on NFV. Wind River Titanium Server
is an application-ready software platform that
enables NFV infrastructure to achieve the
carrier grade reliability required for telecom
networks.
Hall.Stand A1.307
Rohde & Schwarz: mixed signal oscil-
loscope can be expanded to 100 MHz
R&S HMO1002 series mixed signal oscil-
loscopes developed by Rohde & Schwarz
subsidiary HAMEG Instruments can be
expanded at any time from 50 MHz to 70
MHz or even 100 MHz bandwidth by means
of a simple upgrade option. HAMEG recently
introduced this practical upgrade voucher
for all of its instruments, and it is now also
available for the R&S HMO1002. Moreover,
the R&S HMO1002 includes mixed signal
functionality. Measuring analog and digital
signals simultaneously may not be anything
unusual for an oscilloscope these days, but it
is for a T&M instrument in the three figure
price segment.
Hall.Stand A5.476
Microchip: new 8-bit PIC devices
featuring dual ADC peripheral
Microchip announces a new addition to
its PIC12/16LF155X 8-bit microcontroller
(MCU) family with the PIC16LF1554 and
PIC16LF1559 (PIC16LF1554/9) devices.
The PIC16LF1554/9 includes two indepen-
dent 10-bit 100K samples per second Ana-
logue-to-Digital Converters (ADC) with
hardware Capacitive Voltage Divider (CVD)
support for capacitive-touch sensing. This
unique ADC configuration enables more
efficient sensor acquisition and assists with
advanced touch-sensing techniques for
extremely noisy environments, low-power
applications, matrix keypads and water-re-
e
lectronica
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