Production Monitoring System for efficient Shop Floor Control

In today’s global scenario of the need for a sustainable economy, manufacturing industries cannot gamble becoming ineffective and fall behind. Manufacturing process is getting increasingly competitive, claiming higher performance and quality with endless and better execution. Every factory aims to reduce production costs, strengthen production lines, and improve machine utilization and adaptability - not only to enhance product quality but also to improve services.

Any production company with a successful growing business may be quite satisfied with their results. But how much they really know about the operational efficiency of their factory? How can they improve their production capacity without any data? Hence, in order to achieve world-class production efficiency, implementing a smart manufacturing execution system is the way to move forward. But, the traditional approach to manufacturing & machine monitoring is rigid and lacks flexibility, and also it is expensive to apply, having a lot of hurdles in data sharing, imperfect integration with other systems, and providing more security threats as well.

To overcome these challenges and to achieve a successful transition to Industry 4.0 , manufacturing industries should adopt the latest technologies that can incorporate obsolete systems with recent systems. The industry 4.0 protocol MQTT has the critical features that can help solve the challenges and create seamless integration of the data and the machines into a common place to enable deeper analysis and perfect decision making. The MES Solution built over the Solution Provider IoT Platform helps achieving these challenges with ease.

Key Challenges in Traditional Production Management Systems

Data Silos : Present day industries often have machinery from a broad range of suppliers that generate data in unique formats which gives rise to data silos. This becomes the barrier for wide survey & decision-making across the whole industrial operations.

Lacking Visibility : Deep visibility into the individual asset’s performance is lacking in the traditional SCADA systems and it is restricted to the shop floor. Assets can’t be managed anywhere, any time because the machines/equipment data can be viewed & accessed only inside the plant. The impact of machine downtime is very much noticed late at the end of the day or early next day as the transparency of the data is not there due to a non connected setup.

Network Latency : The connection between the industrial equipment & the production management should be highly available. When the connection fails unexpectedly in low bandwidth scenarios, it will cause severe damage to the equipment.

Security Threats : Industrial tracking & visibility is necessary for industrial manufacturing. Some Industries are monitoring data by connecting every user’s mobile phone to the modbus interface on the individual monitoring console. This mandated the professional to be near every production control dashboard to view the status. Besides that, security issues will prevent them from connecting the modbus protocol directly to the internet.

Manual Errors & Data Fudging : Data has traditionally been stored in isolated application silos, requiring significant human effort to integrate and consolidate. Often, this involves exporting data to Excel sheets and then manually importing it into a central system, or manually entering data from one system to another based on available features. This manual process is prone to both intentional and unintentional errors, leading to inaccurate data that can result in incorrect judgements, poor-quality outcomes, and costly delays in deliveries.

Connecting the Factory Shop floor Management with MQTT

The Smart Factory solution is well adapted to address the challenges portrayed above, and it serves as a qualitative tool for determining productivity within the factory shop floor. The two way communication between the Central Manufacturing execution system and the machines are enabled by the secure MQTT communication and helps in controlling the machines based on the data. Last Will & Testament feature permits any application to trigger a message when there is an unexpected disconnection between devices & server. For example, considering a scenario for manufacturing use cases, when manufacturing equipment fails, then the entire production line will be instructed immediately to take action in order to prevent equipment damage. This enables monitoring of manufacturing equipment, SCADA networks, sensor devices, and scenarios involving low bandwidth, such as radio and cellular networks.

The IoT Data storage options provided by the MQTT Broker can be used to avoid the data silos. It is advisable to run one common MQTT Server to connect all your Machines and Data entries. Even if there is a mandate to run multiple servers for security of the MQTT implementation, you can connect all of them to the one common data storage using Python MQTT Broker Interface . The security threats arise when the equipment is directly connected to the internet. Hence, the solution should be connecting the production line with multiple equipment in one server & making it available in a more secure way. In that case, MQTT broker comes with a device level and other MQTT authentication and TLS/SSL to make secure connection between the gateway and MQTT Server.

The MQTT Gateway that comes as part of the solution helps collect all data from production line and send it to the Central MES System. The Gateway can work with the multiple protocols like Modbus, OPC UA, TCP Data push, pulling data out of the DB and a few other protocols.

MQTT Broker also has the capability to connect to the SCADA System that can connect the new generation MQTT Clients data into the traditional System. This helps production management team view and analyze the data at one common place across generations.

In addition, the Mobile/Tablet applications done for the Supervisors, operators, and the management can help them track and provide necessary information on downtime, maintenance, and quality, and will make everyone participate in the system to receive and share information at the shop floor.

We have been building products / solutions for Manufacturing Industry above our MQTT Broker Platform. Our focus was to enable manufacturing Industries to connect their machinery in a reliable and scalable manner using MQTT. One such ready to deploy solution is the Smart Manufacturing execution system, the production/machine monitoring system. This IIoT application will automate the complete data collection, analysis and decision making process of manufacturing industry.

Why MQTT is used in production management system?

The ISA-95 standard played a significant role in Industry 3.0 implementations, where control systems up to Level 2 (from Level 0) were integral to machine operations. This involved data collection through sensors and actuators, control via PLCs, and manual interaction using HMIs. However, moving data from these systems to Production Monitoring Systems and eventually to ERP required manual data transfers. This is where MQTT emerged as an indispensable protocol, enabling seamless connectivity between Level 2 (HMI) and Level 3 (MES). Its lightweight, bidirectional communication made it easy to connect all shop floor machines to the central MES, establishing MQTT as the ideal protocol for efficient data integration. The detailed article on the transformation of Industry 3.0 to Industry 4.0 using MQTT helps understand the transformation with reference to the ISA-95.

IIoT Platform & Production Monitoring System

Solution provider IoT Platform is a profoundly extendable, adaptable, and versatile MQTT utilized for gathering information from IoT edge devices in which it is easy to transfer data to and from associated machines/equipment in a dependable and quick way. The Platform by default supports authentication, multi tenancy, high data throughput, data reception via MQTT and HTTP. The MES Software built over the platform helps in the production monitoring system with the modules like production planning & Control, Dynamic Rescheduling, Process parameter monitoring, Direct acquisition of data from the machines, and more.

OEE - Overall equipment effectiveness analysis: This stage determines the manufacturing machine’s OEE value, which is used to estimate the complete effectiveness of the equipment’s performance in carrying out a specified task, based on actual data on availability, performance, and quality. It determines the amount of manufacturing time that is truly productive. OEE is a metric that calculates efficiency values for all units in the manufacturing industry. The OEE values are calculated after the three parameters have been measured.

Availability analysis: The value of the three components that are needed to estimate the value of total equipment efficiency are directly related to availability (OEE). The availability of time for machine manufacturing tasks is defined.

Performance analysis: The efficiency of a machine in the production process is measured by its performance. The amount of production and the optimum run time of the operating process are used to calculate speed losses, which describes how the engine’s 100% performance is dependent on the amount of planned production time and the ideal cycle time of the operating process.

Quality Analysis: A Quality score is a comparison of the number of good parts versus the number of rejects, or it describes the equipment’s ability to generate items that meet the criteria. Quality concerns quality losses, such as the number of damaged products associated with equipment, which is then transformed into time by determining how much time the equipment is utilised to manufacture the damaged product.

By providing data on KPIs that tied up with the real-time status of your shop floor, which makes this machine monitoring system an extremely useful tool for improving productivity. Performing analysis with the shift based cumulative reports & hourly production reports, will uncover areas to improve OEE manufacturing by connecting dots & eliminating the gap between machine performance & its efficiency. This boosts the preventive maintenance of assets by tracking & monitoring machines at individual level which allows operators to see when & where the flaws in the production line occurs. The real-time data on OEE & production is just a number unless it is turned into an excellent insight & action. This will help you turn the obtained data into actionable insights and make necessary decisions on improving manufacturing productivity. The loss analysis will gather information so that OEE measures may be analyzed to track performance decline. This could take the form of data collection for a specific time period in which you’ve established a performance benchmark. If you have the data to improve world class OEE, especially through the use of IIoT-enabled devices, you should use every opportunity to boost your company’s success.

During the development of this IIoT application, we came to know that broker is doing its core part right with the Pace DPR and that’s why we are able to build such a best production / machine monitoring system that can address all the challenges, a manufacturing company meets.

Conclusion

As the focus on sustainability intensifies, it is essential for manufacturing companies to measure all parameters impacting shop floor efficiency. A robust combination of a production monitoring system with MQTT, Sparkplug, and UNS allows for effective tracking of production, process parameters, quality, operator performance, WIP management, and manufacturing resource planning.

Most factories are now adopting production monitoring systems to enhance efficiency and flexibility. Several factors make MQTT the preferred standard protocol for modernizing the messaging framework in the industry. With its performance scaling capabilities and reliability, the IIoT platform ensures that production management systems can deliver a comprehensive and accurate overview of manufacturing operations.