Moving from a reactive to a proactive service model is a strategic issue for machine builders. Retrieving device usage and status information is the starting point. However, to fully capitalize on remote machine access, it is necessary to abandon traditional reactive service models and bring proactive and preventive measures into use. This both increases uptime for the client, and allows service costs to be drastically reduced. On the customer side, given the cost of stopping a production line, Predictive Maintenance offers a fast Return on Investment. Today the eWON industrial router provides machine builders with a fully integrated solution with the most advanced communication technologies using secure Internet or PPP dial-up.

Basic idea

As shown in the picture above, the move towards a predictive service model - from the left side to the right side - allows emergency visits to be reduced while at the same time comfortable savings to be reached by reducing emergency visits. While machines become more and more sophisticated, Key Performance Index (KPI) monitoring puts the machine builder in touch with the machine automatic control panel allowing him to inform his customers of the correct performance of his machines. It also allows the operational trend of a machine to be traced and aims at a quicker detection of any failure for a better prevention of repair work or anticipation of maintenance operations. To gain the benefits of Predictive Maintenance, the eWON industrial router can:

• Perform local data acquisition
• Log these data for monitoring
• Do some local computations on these data in the Basic language or a high end programming language such as Java
• Regularly transmit these information to a central repository
• Send alarms in the event of defaults, performance losses or malfunctions and provide detailed information in the alarm message

Compared to Remote Diagnosis where the remote connection is initiated after the reception of alarms, Predictive Maintenance means that you are collecting data continuously to keep track of all of your machines KPI for statistics and later review or to analyze recent trends. This may imply some data logging.

Sending regular data logging to a central server may imply that central servers should crunch or analyze billions of data items just to extract the right piece of information.

Therefore, putting some extra intelligence inside the eWON by performing pre-analysis or aggregation of the collected data should ease the work of the central server and the data sent could be a summary of the information needed.

The need for more or less computing power will greatly depend on the complexity of the computation performed on the data. Using Basic for people with minimal computing requirements or using Java for companies with complicated needs can both be found on the eWON industrial router platform.    

For data acquisition, the eWON industrial router stores values in tags inside an internal database. Then these tags can be used either by the programming environment, by the alarm management system or the data logging system.  Alarm notification can also be sent with attachments, which can be text files formatted in “comma separated value” mode or binary files.     

This means that both an operational mode and an exceptional mode can coexist inside the eWON industrial router:

• An operational mode that send values on a regular basis
• And an exceptional mode that sends values when specific conditions arises.    

Regularly sending data means that each eWON router needs to be equipped with its own communication system, made of built-in modems, capable of providing a data connection.     
Predictive maintenance may also require that maintenance or service staff need to connect anytime anywhere to the remote machine, for a failure or quick intervention. This can be accomplished using a dial-up connection or through the Internet.

Advantages

Machine tool manufacturers have to permanently increase the guaranteed machine tool availability. This becomes an important requirement in an exceedingly competitive market with very dynamic evolution.    

eWON industrial router now provides machine builders with a powerful and flexible shell to any machine driven by a PLC or any automation device. With eWON versatility, it is the perfect hardware appliance to develop a strategy of predictive maintenance.

Featured products

The eWON 4xxxCD industrial routers offers the following modem options:

• Mobile/cellular (VPN): eWON ref. EW532x8 for GPRS quad band, eWON ref. EW532xB for UMTS (with fallback to EDGE/GPRS), eWON ref. EW532xA for HSUPA (with fallback to HSDPA, UMTS, EDGE or GPRS)
• ADSL (VPN): eWON ref. EW472x1 for ADSL, eWON ref. EW472x4 for ADSL with PSTN backup mode, eWON ref. EW472x7 for ADSL with GPRS/EDGE backup mode
  
• LAN connection: eWON ref. EW462x1

The ‘x’ in the reference number stands for:                

• ‘6’ if the MPI/Profibus protocol must be used for connection to the PLC(s)
• ‘0’ otherwise.