Central machine monitoring and process optimization are two of the fastest ways to operate production equipment and machines more effectively. Since many machines have a lifespan of 15 to over 30 years, a large part of the existing machinery has neither the computing power nor the storage capacity to capture, store, or communicate the relevant data. The MICA based management shell makes it easy to connect existing systems to Industrie 4.0 systems.
In many cases, older machines also use data formats and protocols from the 80s and 90s that are no longer used by modern PLCs and PCs. As a result, virtualization on the controller neither makes economic sense, nor desirable from the point of view of operational safety.
In the HARTING production, injection molding machines with Euromap 15, a protocol developed in the late 1980s, are integrated as a solution through a MICA -based management shell and can then be used as a modern device via OPC-UA. This procedure can be applied to many other machines and systems with different protocols.
Through the MICA Based on RAMI 4.0, operating parameters can be read out, production schedules uploaded online to the machine, and data continuously collected and stored. These are then available for process optimization, predictive maintenance or product improvement. The modular open source design of the MICA enabled open source code, which greatly reduced development time. The modularity and the use of an intermediate JSON format makes it possible to integrate other legacy and backend protocols by replacing only the protocol containers – for example MQTT to IBM Bluemix or Microsoft Azure.
