Sustainable agriculture, enhancement of Italian cuisine. But also avantgarde efficiency and technology.
Orogel’s philosophy has always been focused on quality, and to do so, the company has chosen to invest in technology as well. This is the decision to modernize the wireless communication network of the logistic handling system.
An urgent need from the logistic system, based on EMS (Electrified Monorail System) technology, combines the two sections of the factory that face a public road points. Here then is the radical intervention that we saw as the arrival of advanced Siemens technology, specific for industrial networks.
“We have decided to replace the entire existing wireless network with the Siemens Scalance W line, which has features and offers specific functionalities for industrial environments and for systems with high translation speeds (for example iFeatures)”, says Valter Zino, of the General Management Orogel plants and technologies.
From the point of view of automation, the system already used Siemens technology, thanks to the support and collaboration of SystemsIntegrators ON.IT Srl and Righi Elettroservizi SpA in particular for the field levels with the Simatic HMI Comfort Panel family and supervision with the Siemens Simatic family PLCs, which over the years have become a standard reference for Orogel.
For the needs of networking, however, Orogel had first chosen to give continuity to the existing wireless infrastructure within the plant, which however has been detected inefficient over time due to the variety and criticality of the environments crossed by the movement circuit.
A malfunction, this, which was going to affect substantially the productivity of the plant: the instability of the wireless connection, in particular in the roaming phases, caused in fact frequent loss of connection between the racks and the concentrator that acts as a traffic manager , interruptions that are so prolonged as to cause the balancer to stop. And the continuous stops in the logistics of transfer caused delays in the power supply of the departments with consequent stops in production lines or shipments to the market, and serious damage to the plant.
Today, thanks to the specific features of the Siemens Scalance W line, it has been possible to proceed with an optimal tuning of the wireless infrastructure identifying the best position of the access points, meanwhile reduced in terms of numbers, in particularly delicate environments for the propagation of the signal. And in the meantime the registration and roaming procedures between adjacent cells have also been optimized. “It was not a simple replacement of equipment, but it was necessary an indepth reception of the communication system, passing from a protocol implemented with TCP communication to timeout to an Industrial Ethernet communication with the Profinet protocol”, adds Zino.
This is why it has been possible to achieve a smooth, fast and reliable wireless communication, eliminating the undesired stops of the racks, but above all by guaranteeing the plant the productivity for which it was designed.
Siemens support is not new to the company. Orogel had already chosen years ago to equip itself with Siemens components and technologies at the cutting edge of factory automation.
Today we have added a further piece with the replacement of the equipment within a month. An operation that avoided the total interruption of the operation of the plant, then completed over the next three months with tuning sessions that led to the final solution. All this involved the intervention of different professionals, from automation experts to those of industrial networks, essential for obtaining the result.
And the replacement has also been confirmed by the working method of Siemens, from the analysis, from the analysis of the state of affairs to the design of the infrastructure, from the beginning order to achieve maximum efficiency.
