An Industry 4.0 approach to develop auto parameter configuration of a bottling process in a small to medium scale industry using PLC and SCADA

Abstract

Recent trends of manufacturing processes, like Industry 4.0 (I4.0), strive to replace existing manual systems with fully self-controlled, reconfigurable processes to improve the overall production system. This paper develops a strategy to track closely the production, reduce the manual control and efficiently monitor the bottling process of a small beverage plant by implementing I40 basic concepts such as decentralization and real-time data analyses. A Siemens S7-1200 PLC communicating via Ethernet TCP/IP with a ZENON SCADA Human Machine Interface (HMI) was used to simulate the operations of a bottling process. The proposed strategy, developed by modeling bottling production as a time function, allows supervisors to be free from manuallyconfiguring bottling process parameters and monitor production steps directly on the SCADA with relevant information.This optimizes production time by reducing users’ interferences with the overall process. At the end of the paper, the experimental results were graphically plotted to illustrate the benefits of the proposed strategy.