Click on the advert above to visit the company web site

Product category: Plantwide control
News Release from: GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms UK | Subject: Cimplicity
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial Team on 16 May 2003

Renault deploys Cimplicity worldwide

Renault has opted for a global overhaul of the paintshop monitoring systems located in its factories.

Renault has opted for a global overhaul of the paintshop monitoring systems located in its factories It has chosen to replace a customised local control station system with an architecture based on PLCs linked to PCs running supervisory monitoring software

GE Fanuc's Cimplicity monitoring software is the agreed option for all Renault factories worldwide.

"Within our factories we make the distinction between production tracking and what comes under production monitoring", explained Didier Culie, Project Manager for the Customer Agreement/Production System Domain Monitoring Department at the Renault Technocentre.

"Tracking by a real-time display of production line status indicators is provided by software that has been developed in-house.

In some workshops, such as in the paint process workshop, there is a need for monitoring, particularly for the logging and monitoring of the various equipment process data such as the temperature and pressure in the tanks".

For around a decade this monitoring function was provided by localised control systems (called DCS) linked to PLCs.

Their role was to collect and display the information collected by the PLCs.

Functionally, these systems served their purpose.

However, they were under-used and only 10% of the monitoring functions were used to fulfil Renault's requirements.

They had a more serious shortcoming: the difficulty of adapting them when carrying out new developments.

Luc Filizzola, engineer at the Renault Technocentre, explained, "The world of the DCS was very isolated, its external connectivity to other factory applications via a computer network was so poor that we found it hard to develop our applications", said Filizzola.

"As a direct consequence, we were unable to improve the responsiveness of the assembly.

Maintenance or backup operations required a visit to the relevant factory each time.

Moreover, developing such equipment, like adding points, entailed very high maintenance expenses".

In short, in terms of ease of development, external connectivity and overall operating cost, the PLC/DCS architecture had reached a dead end.

Since 1998, Renault has been considering ways of improving the architecture in all of the company's factory paint shops.

From the outset, the company has been moving towards a PLC/PC monitoring system solution.

After examining a wide range of monitoring proposals, GE Fanuc's Cimplicity software (marketed in France by Atemation) was finally chosen.

It was chosen for several reasons.

The technical and commercial reasons were obviously the most important.

This choice also matched Renault's long-term goal to have a single tool throughout the world, especially as the Japanese manufacturer Nissan (a subsidiary of Renault) had already chosen Cimplicity.

As well as the normal criteria for choosing such a tool - based on price, external connectivity, ease of maintenance and operation, compliance with IT standards etc - the ability to operate on various operating systems and to adhere to Renault-specific IT constraints were fundamental.

It was therefore imperative that the chosen monitoring system operates in client/server mode.

"Some monitoring systems on the market do operate in client/server mode but only in NT architectures", explained Filizzola.

"In our factories the client workstations operate both on Windows 95 and Windows 98, and, in the near future, even other versions, with Windows NT or Unix servers.

The monitoring system had to manage these client/server links whatever operating system was installed".

This is because workstation usage is widespread, but what each PC can do depends on the user's profile.

Culie explained, "No PC is dedicated, and when a workstation is switched on, the user calls up his profile, in other words a "software kit" which allows him to use the various applications that correspond to his role".

At the Renault factories the PCs that are used have unique specifications.

The idea is to avoid the proliferation of incompatible hardware and software.

In practice, when a user in a factory wants to access a service (the monitoring software, for example) they must have been set up on the factory or the workshop application server beforehand.

If a software problem occurs at a workstation, a new user "kit" will be loaded from the server and if the PC is faulty it is immediately replaced by a standard "Renault" workstation.

Each Renault factory is organised exactly according to the same plan.

To control this organisation, on the one hand a master agreement is required with a PC supplier who will supply PCs formatted precisely to Renault's requirements, and on the other hand the software suppliers must adapt their programs to adhere to certain rules.

For monitoring applications it is not easy to implement the approach chosen by Renault, which requires a distinction to be made between executable programs on the one hand and monitoring mimic diagrams on the other hand.

For a monitoring unit, the registration procedure for a user is typically based on the identification of the hard drive from which the application runs.

As, in Renault's case, the client PC can be any factory machine, this approach had to be removed from the software.

"This directly affected the software usage rights ", explained Patrick Roberge of Atemation, the French distributor of GE Fanuc's Cimplicity.

"We have included this dispensation in the global contract with Renault, making it the first company to benefit from this opportunity at GE Fanuc".

Currently three Renault factories are equipped with this new type of architecture: Batilly near Metz, Palencia in Spain - where there is a configuration of 25 monitoring stations with 70 PLCs beneath them (which corresponds to around 30,000 points to be managed by the monitoring system) - and finally in Douai, Normandy.

These monitoring systems are being installed and commissioned by Renault's in-house teams When these teams have acquired sufficient experience, the next deployments will be left to integrators, who must follow a very specific set of design specifications written by Renault.

In the factories that are already equipped, the fact that there is only one type of monitoring system provides an immediate improvement over the old system, particularly in terms of maintenance.

Whereas before each factory developed its own object database, in order to harmonise applications worldwide, the Technocentre team has developed a symbol object database for all Renault factories with an automatic four-language translation utility: French, English, Spanish and German.

One of the greatest benefits is the remote support facility.

"Thanks to the COM/DCOM capability of Cimplicity, we can directly access the application, or be a client to a remote server, or even simply view the factory mimic diagrams on our workstations at the Technocentre", explained Filizzola.

"Supporting the operators is much easier than it was previously".

"The PLC/monitoring architecture has the great advantage of not being tied to a single manufacturer as was the case before with the DCS", added Culie.

"Using an OPC server between the PLCs and the monitoring system enables us to separate the two levels to attain greater independence from our suppliers, since we can change software or hardware without jeopardising the overall architecture of the system". Request a free brochure from GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms UK ...

• GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms UK: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Engineeringtalk email newsletter
• Engineeringtalk Home Page

Search the Pro-Talk network of sites

Put your news on Engineeringtalk  |   Advertise  |   Get the free Engineeringtalk newsletter  |   Engineeringtalk Home
About Engineeringtalk  |   Copyright © 2000-2008 Pro-Talk Ltd, UK