Textile Finishing

Industry 4.0 potential in textile

production (dyeing and finishing)
Automation in textile finishing started in the 1980s. Today no one has to mized to the technical and security require-
ments. Detailed information on MES (Manu-
start from scratch. Open standards throughout the production chain will not
facturing Execution System) functionality can
happen in near future. Interoperability enables new techniques right now. be obtained in the norm IEC 61512.
Establishing enriched planning, predictive maintenance and predictive en- We can understand that “real-time” can be
ergy management enable immediate practical and financial benefit. interpreted differently when working on ma-
chine-level or ERP.
Back in the early 1990s institutes tried to
Jürgen Jerzembeck Sure, from an economical point of sales view, norm the various field-bus systems world-
Setex Schermuly textile computer GmbH, the most profitable approach is to drive a wide. This is still remembered as the “field-
Mengerskirchen/Germany. blue ocean strategy with open standards. In bus war”. The field busses differ in protocol,
reality, this will not happen in this area due to components and topology, depending on
Vision and reality technological issues. their application area. When in the year 2000
Industry 4.0, SmartFactory and Big Data – we The automation pyramid in Fig. 1 shows 5 the norm IEC 61158 was finally achieved, the
are permanently exposed to news and nu- layers, occupied by highly specialized solu- result was just a compromise with an 8-type
merous publications give us propelling advice tions, whereof each layer-product is opti- specification. In 2002 it was already extend-
for advantageous digital transformation. En- ed with more types.
gineering organizations in Europe have built Extending the perspective to computer oper-
workgroups to present whitepapers and Fig. 1 ating systems, so far there is no compatibility
specification input on standardization. Man- between Microsoft Windows, Apple IOS or
ufacturers might get the impression that Android. This just gives a small impression of
things are going to be moving along very how difficult the normalizing of such compo-
quickly with new technology, and it might be nents or operating areas is, and that a final
better to wait with investments in this area. standard might refer to numerous possibili-
The reality is, that smart sensors with built in ties.
PLCs, communicating in real-time with hosts
on the internet, will not replace the actual The data are already in the systems
techniques in textile production in the near Growing competition due to production in
future. low-wage-countries, increasingly shorter de-

Fig. 2
OrgaTex system and
integration overview

220 Melliand International 4/2016


livery times, cost of energy and environmen-
tal costs – textile production has been under
pressure to innovate since the 1990s. For
years, many companies have introduced ERP
software for data management. Yet for an
efficient coordination and optimization of
production, this is not sufficient.
At the other end, machines and controls have
become powerful and have been connected
to supervisor software. At this level all infor-
mation and data from manufacturing
processes are collected and forwarded. This
one-dimensional orientation is losing its ef-
fectivity. The planning and controller layers
are blending in functionality and must be co-
ordinated to pay off for an enterprise (Fig. 2).
Whereas the optimization of a single produc-
tion processes require a lot of time and cost
with traditional systems, new systems like
the OrgaTex by Setex provide entirely new
possibilities. To be more precise, it is not just
the software which raises the system value to
Industry 4.0 level. MES software in general
has gathered a lot of functionality during the
last years. But a sustainable and efficient ap-
proach is realized solely by embedding the
production cells into an efficient communica-
Fig. 3
Smart maintenance stakeholder matrix
Fig. 4
Maintenance Manager parameters
tion in either direction – to the machines and
between the machines. In that context, the
OrgaTex system with its integrated network-
ing infrastructure provides a solid basis for
Industry 4.0 solutions.
Industry 4.0 maintenance example
Textile dyeing and finishing machines need
regular maintenance of various components,
depending on the period of use, action time,
frequency of use, process specific require-
ments or a combination of these to perform
at the highest, most reliable level possible.
To realize a digital maintenance workflow, in-
cluding predictive maintenance by data
analysis, the challenge is to add new func-
tionality in each system layer and manage an
effective communication between the differ-
ent system layers.
Smart maintenance should assist different
stakeholders. Unforeseen downtimes on pro-
duction machines cause reaction on short
notice for maintenance staff, influences pro-
duction deadlines and operation cost. The
matrix in Fig. 3 explains some details.
A software module in the MES will manage
the required data, predict and plan mainte-
Textile Finishing
nance actions and manage interaction with
daily production planning. This software may
hold the definition of production machine
maintenance components of each machine
(cyber-physical system setup), maintenance
rules (coming from the machine manufactur-
er), detailed digital documentation and a
plan board.
The maintenance planning is predicted by
analyzing parameters, which have to be
added in the PLC(s) and HMI(s). The PLC and
HMI layer use specific operating systems and
proprietary functions. Standard MES soft-
ware will need “translators” to communicate
between the layers. For security, know-how
and other reasons, these interfaces do not
work as powerfully as a native and direct
communication.
As Setex is a supplier of machine control sys-
tems and MES software, each of the system-
layers gets its own interoperable additional
features.
The new, resulting interoperable system adds
value to different stakeholder. Maintenance
is integrated in the MES. The integration al-
lows better production planning, better han-
dling of complex situations, longer equip-
ment availability through predictive mainte-
nance and economically benefits.
Energy management equivalent
Resource efficiency is one of the primary driv-
ers of technical developments. Together with
the increased responsibility for impact on the
environment, this places the requirement on
machinery and equipment manufacturers to
design intelligent networks.
The challenge is to provide solutions with an
efficient real-time communication between
all systems. Even “machine to machine” con-
nections become possible with this system.
Unlike traditional energy management sys-
tems with monitoring and reporting of ener-
gy flow and cost, the predictive energy man-
agement takes action long before limits are
hit.
A very interesting area in this context is to
avoid electrical and gas peaks, something
Fig. 5
SECOM 646 energy display
Melliand International 4/2016 221
Textile Finishing
that can cause considerable financial ex-
pense. Country and customer specific proj-
ects require different technological “en-
abler”, but all of them finalize in algorithms
for the concept “next best action”.
The application in Fig. 5 is programmed to
balance energy loads. The system is config-
ured with parameters for gas and electricity
load per time period.
As soon as a critical steam load is predicted
by the algorithm, the application checks the
scope of the actions. The action with the least
222 Melliand International 4/2016
impact on production time and cost is exe-
cuted. For example, production processes can
be altered during production runtime to run
alternatively, without influencing quality and
planning. The action chain includes dosing
systems, hot water boilers, machine tanks, the
step of each active machine program, pro-
duction process situation and much more. In
the case of 2 machines resulting identical in
production steps, the machines take direct
actions between themselves.
To date, predictions deal with mechanisms of
prescriptive analytics of appropriate parame-
ters. The trend of more people asking for
more tools for analysis (without the analyst)
will bring forth business analytics software
with built-in cognitive abilities for trend
analyses.
However, before factories get smarter than
good old-fashioned human knowledge, it is
suggested to start collecting and storing data
now with modern MES systems, helping
from day one to reveal potential through the
digitalization of the working processes. ■