The global site of the UK's leading magazine for automation, motion engineering and power transmission
28 March, 2024

LinkedIn
Twitter
Twitter link

High-capacity link-up will give real-time energy data

23 September, 2010

Mitsubishi has become the first automation hardware vendor in North America with a tested and approved connection to the new Sustainability and Sensor Data Management capabilities in Oracle’s Manufacturing Operations Center (MOO) – designed to deliver real-time information about plant-floor production and energy consumption. The announcement was made at the Oracle OpenWorld 2010 show in San Francisco, California, on 22 September.

“Allowing customers to make more intelligent decisions pertaining to their manufacturing process is key to increasing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), while reducing their total cost of ownership,” explains Bob Miller, solutions marketing manager for Mitsubishi Electric Automation in the US. “Oracle’s Sustainability and Sensor Data Management capabilities add the ability to determine very precisely the energy consumption of each system.

“Being able to determine the energy cost of each individual product and classify the energy consumption as value-added versus non-value added consumption, allows customers to reduce costs by reducing the non-value added energy consumption,” he adds. “This enables the customer to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and simultaneously improve their cost of production.”

Having real-time information on machine status and energy consumption gives manufacturers the ability to make decisions immediately, such as whether upgrading their systems will have a beneficial ROI. Automatic calculation of carbon emissions will also help provide information needed to receive tax rebates for green manufacturing, and help to determine if companies are complying with regulations.

“The connection that Mitsubishi Electric has delivered to our new Sustainability Sensor Data Management feature helps organisations monitor all their energy usage in the context of production activities in real-time,” says Manish Modi, vice-president of applications development at Oracle. “This integration allows customers to achieve quicker ROI and help them accelerate their sustainability and continuous improvement initiatives.”

Working with Oracle, Mitsubishi has linked its e-F@ctory and eco-F@ctory connection technologies to the MOO. These technologies are designed to handle high levels of data processing and interaction, and by linking to sensors and automation hardware such as VSDs, they can be used to collect and log energy data. They can handle levels of data that might otherwise overwhelm control systems and force costly retrofits or clumsy work-arounds.

Alternative systems include OLE for process control (OPC), Scada software and Excel spreadsheets. But, according to Mitsubishi, these were not designed for data collection and database connections between the business and plant floor. They need complex infrastructures, often with multiple PCs that need to be maintained and protected. These multi-layer architectures have many possible points of failure and can be difficult to implement and maintain.




Magazine
  • To view a digital copy of the latest issue of Drives & Controls, click here.

    To visit the digital library of past issues, click here

    To subscribe to the magazine, click here

     

Poll

"Do you think that robots create or destroy jobs?"

Newsletter
Newsletter

Events

Most Read Articles