Ethernet converters bridge data gap at cigarette major

Henley-in-Arden, UK — Ethernet converter devices are helping to resolve production planning and data visualisation problems at Philip Morris International’s factory in Bergen op Zoom, the Netherlands —Europe’s largest cigarette factory, producing around 90 billion filter cigarettes a year.

The 1,800-employee Dutch operation employs 40 parallel production lines, which combine paper, filters and tobacco to produce up to 12,000 cigarettes per minute. The products are then bundled, packaged and wrapped in foil to preserve the flavour, and then packed in shipping cases.

As part of a recent project to optimise production, the company identified an information ‘gap’ between production and management as a barrier it fine-tuning production planning, improving logistics, tracing products and assuring quality.

A particular problems highlighted by the project was that the management team were not receiving up-to-date production data. This was because the machine controllers did not send machine data such as run times, messages, signals and malfunctions or production data on quantities, weights and quality to a central system.

To resolve these issues, Philip Morris opted for Ethernet TCP/IP as the connecting element between its IT systems and production across the whole company. The cigarette-making machines were to be connected via Ethernet to the company network, and data was also to be transferred from the machine controllers and made available to different applications.

The firm’s existing Siemens S5 controllers on the cigarette-making machines did not have TCP/IP on board, so an Ethernet interface was needed. The company selected ‘echolink’, a serial Ethernet converter device manufactured by INAT of Nuremberg, Germany.

“We decided on echolink because of the simple implementation of the devices and because already running programmes didn’t have to be adapted,” explained S Kok, electrical engineer at Philip Morris, in a statement issued by INAT’s UK distributor MAC Solutions of Henley-in-Arden.

The INAT unit is an intelligent protocol converter, which is equipped with five serial interfaces and one TCP/IP interface. Connection is via the serial interface of the S5 controller, which means that one echolink device can be used as the Ethernet connection for up to five S5 controllers.

The echolink device also enables PLC programming and process data visualisation. As well as the standard IP, TCP and UDP protocols, echolink supports S7-Header, S5-Header, ISO on TCP (RFC1006) and Modbus on TCP. On the serial side, MPI/PPI, AS511 (S5-PG), 3064(R), RK512, Telnet and Modbus RTU are all supported. The converter is designed to decode all protocols so that each serial protocol can be converted into each of the Ethernet protocols above.

For the 40 production lines, each with up to 8 controllers, only two echolink devices per line were required to provide all controllers with network capability. The 80 echolink devices were installed and configured in parallel with the parameterisation of all OPC connections, without interrupting production.

“Thanks to echolink and OPC, up-to-date information is now available to us,” said Kok. “This allows us to monitor the performance of machines and production. Performance and quality problems can now be detected and analysed early, so that appropriate measures can be taken in time,” he added.