Maintainability

Too often in manufacturing automation projects making life easier for maintenance personnel is not a high-priority requirement, or the requirement is stated in such a general way that just about any new system can claim to have made maintenance easier. At IPACT, we design and implement all of our systems with maintenance concerns at a very high priority.  The key question we ask ourselves is this:  “If the system suddenly stops working at 2:00 a.m., what methodologies can we use and what tools can we provide to make it straightforward for a maintenance technician, or better yet, an operator, to understand the problem?” First, of course, we lay a good, organized foundation for understandable code by using our structured system design and system implementation approaches.  However, our idea was to make it normally unnecessary for anyone to even look in the PLC code to see what was happening.  We wanted them to be able to diagnose just by looking at the Human-Machine Interface (HMI). Therefore, on all of our projects that employ sequencing (which is the great majority of them), we employ HMI tools to render the Sequential Function Charts (SFCs) so that the process logic may be visually tracked.  This helps maintenance personnel and operators greatly, because the SFCs break the logic down into manageable steps.  They have a visual representation of where the process is stopped, and what it is waiting for in order to continue.  We believe that this offers a tremendous benefit to our customers.   Please click on the following screens to view a demonstration of this concept. The following is an example HMI that renders process logic in SFC format. The current process steps are highlighted in green. This easily identifies the present state of the logic. Anyone trying to understand or troubleshoot the system is significantly helped when the system logic is presented in this format. In practice, most if not all process steps are clickable to bring up the SFC logic for those individual processes.

Integrated Process Automation & Control Technologies