Next time you add sugar to your cereal or coffee, spare a thought for Eridania, Italy's largest sugar producer. The company produces more than 794 thousand tons of sugar, that is a total of 50% of Italy's national production. However, the sugar season is only four months long, and the company's entire output must be produced in this very short but hectic period.
The company has 12 plants all based in the Pianura Padana area and during the production season, the plants work flat-out 24 hours a day, non-stop for about four months. The company's main need during this busy production period is for maximum production efficiency which means detecting and solving any production problems as quickly and efficiently as possible. The solution was a centralized control and monitoring system with distributed PLCs that allows a small team of only 4 people to maintain maximum production efficiency for 12 remote plants without travelling.
The concept
The manager responsible for S.I.E.R.S. (Servizi Impianti Elettrici Reti e Strumentazione), is Enea Zanoli who chose the existing plant in Molinella as the headquarters for all maintenance services. Because in most of the plants all the automation systems are already connected to supervisory systems via a LAN, the natural evolution has been to extend the existing LAN on a geographic level. So they installed a WAN (wide area network) with Molinella as the main node. As a result, all data acquired by supervisory systems as well as functional or diagnostic data from the PLCs is available to the maintenance personnel in Molinella so they can verify and know in advance the status of each plant, without the need to physically travel to each site.
The solution
All the plants are connected via the ISDN network to Molinella's Research Center. In each plant, the existing systems are connected to this ISDN network. The Series 90™-30 and 90™-70 PLCs at each plant are equipped with Ethernet boards and the supervisory systems, based on CIMPLICITY® HMI, exchange data with the PLCs using standard TCP/IP protocol. All this data is available to Molinella's Center. The use of standard technologies such as Ethernet, TCP/IP and ISDN together with CIMPLICITY® HMI’s Client/Server structure resulted in a distributed and fully integrated architecture without the need for any customized software development. Equally important was that this important goal achieved directly by the company technicians without any external support.
The benefits
In the two years since the beginning of this project, the benefits resulting from this centralized approach are well proven and the same philosophy is being applied to all new or revamped within the company. Already, CIMPLICITY® HMI systems installed include 22 Servers (2 with Server Redundancy) and 28 Viewers. Maintenance technicians can view all screens originating from different plants using the CIMPLICITY® Viewers, and development tools allow them to modify both screens and configurations on every CIMPLICITY® Server from the main center in Molinella. In the same way, a Logicmaster 90 programming system connected to the Ethernet network allows users to modify and download Ladder logic to the remote PLCs' CPUs. If necessary, technicians based in Molinella can check Fault Tables on the remote systems, make a diagnosis and explain to local electricians how to intervene to solve a problem in the most efficient way. Most importantly, this high level of control and monitoring has been achieved without the need to travel to plant and in real time. The overall result is a substantial time saving and an even better use of human resources. The company's 12 plants are now maintained by only 4 people - thanks to the CIMPLICITY® HMI and distributed PLC solution.
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