With 197 production sites in 29 countries, the Wienerberger Group is one of the international industry leaders in building material and infrastructure solutions. In order to defend this pioneering position even in times of increasingly fierce global competition, the Group has launched a comprehensive digitalization offensive. On the one hand, the production of smart products - such as plastic pipes that collect data on water levels or rainfall - and the development of new digital business models are being driven forward. On the other hand, the company is doing everything it can to increase transparency in its own plants.

The digital twins

"Our vision is to create a digital twin of every production line, which not only stores process, planning and quality data, but also detailed information on the training provided to plant operators," outlines Roy Sibbald, Manufacturing Excellence Officer at Wienerberger subsidiary Pipelife. Ultimately, he wants to know whether every single minute of production time was used productively or not. "If not, it wasn't a good minute. The same applies to every gram of raw material we use. Was it turned into something that can be sold or what happened to it? The value of reliable answers to all these questions is enormous," explains the expert, who, according to Manfred Heger, Head of IT Strategy, Innovation & Projects at Wienerberger, has been instrumental in advancing digitalization in the production environment.

Extrusion lines 21 and 26 at Pipelife's Wiener Neudorf site were selected for the proof of concept of a solution developed together with solution providers TietoEVRY and HEAP Engineering as well as Beckhoff. Plastic pipes with special quality requirements are produced on these lines. "Wall thicknesses, ovality, eccentricity, kilograms per meter, sawing pulses and much more must be recorded here," says Andreas Roither-Voigt, Senior Business Consultant at TietoEVRY, describing a production process in which, among other things, it must be determined which pipes were cut down in what time or at what speed and whether this was really done with millimetre precision. The EL1512 and EL5151 Ethercat terminals support these measurement tasks: "One I/O terminal enables the direct connection of incremental encoders, while the other transports the current counter readings in real time to calculate the pipe lengths in Twincat - all on the edge gateway," explains the control engineer.

Industrial PC as an edge device

Millions of data from various Wienerberger Group plants now flow into the cloud every day for analysis purposes. The transmitted signals are provided with unique factory, line and machine type codes to ensure they can be clearly assigned. "By joining forces, we created a 'single source of truth' to make the company's vision of 'all relevant data online - all the time' a reality. It was also important to ensure that every user is ultimately provided with the information that is relevant to them. "Regardless of whether a data scientist wants to reuse raw data in machine learning models or whether it flows into various reporting tools in an already cleansed and/or concentrated form, it must always be complete and correct," emphasizes Manuel Hausjell, IoT and Data Consultant at TietoEVRY.

Standardized integration into the IoT network

Accordingly, the way in which the individual machines are to be integrated into the Internet of Things network is also standardized and specified by the project managers. An ultra-compact C6030 Industrial PC from Beckhoff plays a central role as gatekeeper to the Azure IoT hub in the cloud. Its compactness and multi-core processor performance of up to 3.6 GHz per core make it the perfect edge device, as Lukas Pechhacker, Managing Director of HEAP Engineering, explains: "This is the advantage of PC-based control technology - the computers are scalable according to requirements and offer sufficient performance reserves for data pre-processing on the spot. With winders, for example, the sampling intervals are in the millisecond range. Edge computing is therefore used to translate these into rotational speeds in order to limit the flow of information to the cloud."

The author: Balazs Bezeczky heads the Vienna sales office of Beckhoff

© Beckhoff

The C6030 with Twincat 3 IoT Data Agent generally has many "interpreter" functions to perform: On the one hand, Twincat ADS and OPC UA are used to build communication bridges between machines of different ages and origins, and on the other, it acts as a gateway to the cloud. "With a total of 197 production sites in 29 countries, we have to deal with an extremely heterogeneous machine landscape and numerous protocols that have to be brought down to a common denominator. In some cases, EL6001 Ethercat terminals are required as serial RS232 interfaces to establish the desired connections, in others this works via OPC UA," explains Lukas Pechhacker.
Two plants - one in Sweden and one in the Netherlands - were even integrated into the IoT network remotely due to the coronavirus-related travel restrictions. "The local electricians provided the crucial details about the existing infrastructure. The required components were then ordered from Beckhoff and preconfigured by HEAP Engineering so that they only had to be connected on site using plug-and-play. HEAP Engineering then stepped in again to carry out the final configuration via a secure remote connection and we set the appropriate course in the cloud and took care of the data quality checks," says TietoEVRY employee Manuel Hausjell, describing the collaboration. "We are constantly coming up with new ideas about what else we could do to improve day-to-day operations in the plants, benchmarking between the individual sites, achieving quality improvements, supporting predictive maintenance, using fewer resources and much more," says Roy Sibbald, who is aware that digitalization is an ongoing process. "You can only become lean if valid comparative data is available. And the great thing about our system is that it is easily expandable and scalable," summarizes the Manufacturing Excellence Officer. As a result, more and more current transformers are currently being installed in the plants because, after all, it is not just every minute and every gram that counts, but also every kilowatt hour of energy. The project is therefore also making a significant contribution to achieving sustainability targets, saving CO2 and reducing the consumption of energy and raw materials. And with the subsequent implementation of QR code recognition, the adaptability of the installed solution has also already been proven. "All we had to do was activate the vision licenses on the IPC, connect a camera via Ethernet and add real-time image processing to the edge gateway with Twincat Vision. Of course, the read QR codes are transferred to the cloud using the Twincat IoT Data Agent. The data is also available for use in the MES and ERP system," says Balazs Bezeczky, Head of Beckhoff's Vienna sales office.