Innovation before the Big Data Era

This project was executed back in the 90’s, well before the invention of an entire ecosystem which is now known as Big Data and before Internet became prevalent in all settings and industries. What was seem as innovative at that time, can now be achieved far easier and faster with IPv6 reaching every single device on the plant floor, being able to be monitored remotely with ease.

The client

A midsized German manufacturer of machines and equipment.

Cement bagging machines

A cement production plant is made of several machines responsible for weigh and bag cement. Actually, each machine have several mats, which work independently and are capable of reporting the measured weight of each bag of cement produced. A malfunction on a given mat may cause bags to be underweight or overweight, which are both unacceptable situations.

Instantaneous quality control indicators are required

Instantaneous information about the number of bags produced is required, alongside with mean weight and standard deviation per machine or per mat. Summary reports are required, as well as reports which forecast possible failures leading to underweight or overweight.

Enabling a solution

Mathminds wrote a desktop application which collects the data from bagging machines via a multiserial communication board which was selected and integrated to the solution. The application performs calculations based on the weight of each bag of cement produced, in a way which standard deviation can be calculated instantaneously and quality indicators can be derived, allowing forecasting of malfunctioning mats.

Conclusion

• Selection and integration of hardware components;
• Innovative algorithm for calculation of standard deviation, presenting great performance.
• Visualization of quality control indicators.
• Alerts when failures happen or are forecasted to happen.