(400e) Scheduling As a Cornerstone of CPAS

Production sites face more and more intense world-wide competition. In the longterm only plants simultaneously managing to optimize quality, availability, flexibility and cost will remain competitive. Production must furthermore adhere to increasingly complex, all-embracing regulations.

A collaborative process automation system (CPAS) is often defined as a method to unify previously diverse systems in order to achieve operational excellence. Sharing the data, knowledge and functional views ensures that each functional group in the plant understands the operational situation, their interdependencies, and their role in improving it. CPAS thus provides a common platform for a plant’s entire operations, from engineering to process optimization and asset management.

Control systems that automate and manage production are at the heart of process industries. These systems are networks of interconnected sensors, actuators, controllers and computers, often distributed across vast processing plants that help manufacturers run their operations safely and cost effectively, minimizing waste and ensuring consistent product quality.

Through a CPAS infrastructure that is functionally transparent, logically concise and standards based various functional components can be connected, as it efficiently and effectively supports vertical and horizontal integration of data access between various functional solution components. Thus, e.g. a control system can directly react to alarms in an intelligent way and planning and scheduling can base the performance assumptions on real time asset data. Having the possibility to cross-link various systems enables new level of applications that reaches far beyond current functional capabilities.

Being the coordinating element of a plant, scheduling can in fact through the utilization of existing knowledge reach far better and production plans, where both EWO and smart manufacturing objectives are included in a balanced way. With given data availability, it can be expected that e.g. energy and quality management become standard functional partners, which together drives the plant towards lower costs, better quality and optimal energy efficiency. In this presentation we will present two examples, where quality and energy information can create significant added value to the production facility - only through the availability of right data at the right place. The main focus can thus be put on developing and exploring new ideas of cross-collaboration between systems.