• In order to guarantee continuous operation, the automation components in the plant will initially be retained.
• Use of virtualization in order to become less dependent on operating system cycles.
• Redundant setup of the control system and access via 27 operator terminals and the intranet.
• Openness for future modernizations.
• Modern analyses for plant availability, productivity, energy consumption and quality.
• Availability of the production data over a long period for reasons of traceability.
• Low training costs for the operating personnel.

The Hot Dip Galvanizing Plant by thyssenkrupp Steel Europe is about 300 meters long with an annual capacity of about 440,000 metric tons of galvanized sheet steel. The products are mainly destined for the car manufacturing industry. The bottleneck plant has been in continuous 24h operation since 1964, interrupted only by maintenance intervalls. It was not technically feasible to expand the existing visualization solution and faults sometimes occurred, so thyssenkrupp decided on a fundamental modernization and partially new solution which gives the option of expanding the system in the future.

• For the control system, focus relies on the Simatic WinCC V7 SCADA system – redundant and in a virtual IT infrastructure.
• focus opted for the Simatic Process Historian – also in a virtual environment – as a central long-term data archive.
• A Simatic IPC547E industrial PC is used as the engineering station for the control system to allow adaptations to the WinCC project to be carried out and tested independently of productive operation.
• Industry-standard Simatic Thin Clients are used as the hardware for the majority of the operator stations.