Automotive component supplier Faurecia maintains plants throughout 34 countries around the world, where it manufactures seats, airbags, emissions-control systems and other components for vehicles. Two years ago, the firm began upgrading its proprietary manufacturing execution system (MES), IJ Core—partly to improve its performance and partly to make it easier to share data related to its manufacturing processes with its customers by making that information accessible via a secure, cloud-based interface.
Faurecia turned to Kepware, a company that sells industrial-automation software, to help make that transition. It knew Kepware was developing an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solution for its KEPServerEX software product that Faurecia was already using to connect programmable logic controllers (PLCs) on its plant floors to IJ Core.
“We started to discuss with Kepware how we could use this IoT product that they were developing” and whether it could be integrated into IJ Core, says Rafael Unruh, Faurecia’s competence center manager. The Kepware IoT Gateway is a software plug-in that runs on the KEPServerEX communications platform, pushing data from devices on the factory floor, such as robotic arms used to move assemblies or components, to a cloud-based platform of the customer’s choosing.
Sam Elsner, Kepware’s senior applications engineer, explains that the key enabler behind the IoT Gateway was to develop data translators that would serve to bridge its customers’ operational technology (OT) departments with their information technology (IT) teams. This entailed transitioning from an OPC Data Access server interface, which permits communication between process-control equipment and an MES (in Faurecia’s case, that would be IJCORE), to a server interface that uses HTTP protocols built on the Representational State Transfer (ReST) architecture for networked applications.
Kepware’s director of marketing, Torey Penrod-Cambra, recalls that after collaborating on a different project with Splunk, a company that sells tools for searching and analyzing large stores of data via a Web-based interface, Kepware’s engineers realized that a data architecture using Web-based protocols would be a powerful means for helping its customers create that OT-IT bridge.
The issue was not that the OPC Data Access protocols would not work, but that building the IoT Gateway with Web-based protocols would make the data that KEPServerEX collects from process-automation devices, such as PLCs, easier to share with IT-based systems for a wide range of applications. These include network-security, data-analysis, building-management, enterprise resource planning and asset-management systems.
KEPServerEX is a communications platform that is connected to each monitored device on the factory floor via a local network. It collects data regarding metrics, such as the number of rotations of a robotic arm, or the quantity of completed products or components produced. The IoT Gateway, which also runs on the local network as an extension of KEPServerEX, connects this data to the cloud using a REST client agent, which stores information and then periodically pushes it to the cloud, where any application or Web service that the customer uses can access that data.
One of Faurecia’s objectives was to use the IoT Gateway, in conjunction with a mobile version of IJ Core, to make it easier for its plant managers to receive alerts—even if they were not at the factory at the time—about any machines on its floor that might require maintenance, based on changes to their output or operation. Another objective was to enable company managers working in offices far from the factory to receive faster updates about the plant’s production metrics—anything from the machines’ health to an investigation into production problems being detected during quality testing of various parts—by logging into IJ Core remotely.
“In the past,” Unruh says, “it was difficult to get this information to [our OEM partners] because it was not Web-based, and so we could not get the information to them in real time.”
So far, Faurecia is only using the IoT Gateway at its Porto Real factory in Brazil, which is a small facility with four PLCs. But the company plans to expand the pilot program, and will soon install the IoT Gateway software at a factory in the Czech Republic that runs 50 PLCs. That installation is expected to be completed this summer.