Real-time locating enables flexible production
models
Finding new approaches in material supply
Real-time locating enables flexible production
models
Electrical & Electronic (E&E)
Siemens AG
Nuremberg Germany
Modern Industrie 4.0 production.
Wide range of products to be produced - from sophisticated
industrial electronics to engineering-based systems, therefore the nature of
the business here is with low volume per type, high product mix, volatile
demands and no repeat aspect.
Components are transported in black boxes from a central warehouse to
distribution stations, finished goods to shipping department. What´s more, about
2,500 boxes with new content are coming in every day.
Accompanying documents made the boxes hardly distinguishable “at a
glance”.
A lot of time spent on searching caused many activities
non-productive.
We needed system which:
Has significantly higher flexibility at comparable costs.
Tells us the current location of material boxes, flexibly and in
real time.
Runs in the background automatically and all the time.
Can be utilized for many
different use cases.
SIMATIC RTLS based on UWB consists of:
Transponders SIMATIC RTLS4083T
with paper ink display. Transponders are attached to the moving objects, such
as boxes, components, goods, products, etc. and used for position detection.
RTLS Gateways which are linked
via a separate Industrial Ethernet network.
Locating Manager which collects
data from gateways via SCALANCE XM400 switches, calculates and transmits the
coordinates to the target systems for display to employees.
Further software components:
“Location Intelligence“ connects the locating data from SIMATIC RTLS with the business processes in the production.
Route planning and synchronized control over AGVs as a next step.
The
real-time locating by SIMATIC RTLS thus represents a key to higher productivity
and flexibility.
Lorenz Rappl,
Factory manager, Fürth
Unceasing information about the location of the boxes and how long
they have been in production and therefore less time spent on searching and
obvious improvement of throughput times.
Possibility to view the positions of all boxes belonging to a
particular order with a positioning accuracy in the centimeter range.
No need of printed accompanying documents thanks to ePaper transponders.
