CONSOLIDATION, COMMUNICATION, CONTROL

In the Jacksonville plant, Kepware provides the connectivity between the PLCs, QMOS, Wonderware and in the future, the IBA historian. Operations are separated into two domains, the plant floor/process side and the corporate side. The Oracle ERP resides on the corporate domain and Wonderware, the PLCs, IBA historian reside on the process domain. QMOS and Kepware straddle between the process side and corporate because QMOS – via Kepware’s communication – delivers data that both corporate and the process people use. There are two redundancy KepServers on the process side and another two KepServers on the corporate side. The plant is running the KepServers as simulation modules where it acts as a client without having any extra drivers or licenses installed.

Two main challenges at the Jacksonville plant were to solve the problems of overtaxing the PLCs and managing the traffic on the network from both the corporate and process domains. “With KepServerEx’s ability to read a variety of PLCs, it helped us overcome those two challenges,” notes Parrotta. “We’ve also purchased some of the Kepware redundancy licenses and we’ll be using those for the IBA historian, since we only have one IBA server. Redundancy helps us safeguard our operations in the event that a server goes down.”

The historian creates reports that operators are consistently analyzing. The plant views redundancy as high on its list to maintain operational efficiencies. It uses LinkMaster to connect the KepServers together. “We use LinkMaster to deliver tags from the melt shop to corporate to the rolling mill in order to generate some of the plant energy readings on gas, electric, etc. When we get all the tags in one spot, we run a single consolidated report, otherwise we would have to run two reports from two different systems and manually add up the numbers,” states Parrotta.

The plant uses Kepware as the vehicle to communicate information to and from the corporate domain. LinkMaster transfers data to and from the melt shop to corporate and back to the rolling mill or in any data configuration that is needed, then the data goes to the IBA historian for a complete plant utility report. IBA adds tags together, calculates the values and delivers a comprehensive report.

“Kepware is a critical part of our operations, particularly its ability to manage communications among the array of PLCs that we have distributed throughout our mills. There are lots of different options out there that can satisfy what we need to do, but we chose Kepware because it bridges the gap between our MES system and the PLCs to get us the information we need,” concludes Parrotta. “It enables us quickly add tags on the fly and log them to an historian. We are pleased with the results and plan to standardize all of our plants on it.”

Gerdau Ameristeel Corporation, 4221 W. Boy Scout Boulevard, Suite 600, Tampa, FL 33607, 813-286-8383, Fax: 813-207-2355, www.gerdauameristeel.com.

Kepware Technologies, 400 Congress Street, 4th Floor, PO Box 579, Portland, ME 04101, 207-775-1660, Fax: 207-775-1799, www.kepware.com.