OPC capabilities provide equipment continuity

Standards-based software communications protocol provides common data exchange method between industrial devices and applications.

Husky Injection Molding Systems is a supplier of injection moulding equipment and services to the plastics industry.

Many companies use Husky's equipment to create plastics products for the food and beverage, medical, automotive and consumer electronics markets.

Throughout its 50-plus years of experience in the industry, Husky introduced generations of injection moulding equipment to deliver improved performance and functionality.

Each generation would often include a different controller platform with different protocols.

Customers were required to create communications drivers between the latest Husky controller and their existing control and monitoring applications.

This was time-consuming and expensive for customers who relied on third-party vendors to create the interfaces.

Another downside was that end-users were locked into that vendor's software.

Without the resources or expertise to write their own drivers, they could not change their monitoring software without losing their connectivity to the Husky equipment, and so were limited to what the vendor could offer.

Customers found connecting additional Husky equipment with new controllers to their existing control and monitoring applications increasingly complex and expensive.

Carlos Sanchez, Husky Project Manager, said: "Our customers were suffering from problems with the third party interface".

To address this, Husky developed a protocol to interface applications with any type of Husky equipment.

Husky Host was a success with customers as it eliminated many adoption headaches, reduced integration costs, made it easier to upgrade their plants, and alleviated Husky's need to support problems caused by third party interfaces.

Customers began asking Husky for complete turnkey systems that would provide equipment and plant monitoring capabilities.

Plant monitoring software would provide customers many benefits, including the ability to access real-time equipment status, display trends, receive equipment notifications, visualise processes, view machine performance reports and gather data for analysis.

Rather than write a monitoring application, Husky chose to use an existing application from Matrikon.

Matrikon's Processnet web-based monitoring application, branded as Husky Smartlink, would provide the control and monitoring software component of the turnkey offering.

Husky needed a way for customers to connect their different generations of Husky equipment to Smartlink, as the proprietary Husky protocol would not allow the necessary open connectivity into the application.

Sanchez chose Matrikon OPC to provide the connectivity.

OPC is a standards-based software communications protocol that provides a common data exchange method between industrial devices and applications.

With Smartlink's built-in OPC capabilities, OPC was a natural choice.

While newer controllers found in Husky equipment had built-in OPC connectivity, most users had legacy equipment that had none.

And DCom (distribute component object model), the underlying technology used to carry OPC messages, presented configuration and security issues that made it difficult to network the equipment.

To resolve these issues, Husky asked Matrikon to develop the Matrikon OPC server for Husky Host.

"Matrikon OPC was very responsive and supportive in designing and building the OPC server", said Sanchez.

"The server has been successfully deployed in plants throughout the world over the past two years, and is working trouble-free from Australia to the Americas and Europe".

With the Matrikon OPC server for Husky Host, the company continued using Husky Host to connect legacy equipment, avoid the DCom setup and security issues, and have the data available to Smartlink.

With Smartlink and the OPC Server in place, Husky had a complete turnkey system that provided the benefits of Smartlink with the flexibility of open connectivity for its customers' other equipment.

Husky's customers can now rely solely on Husky to provide all the services required for communication, data gathering and display without the complication of third parties.

Amcor Pet Packaging, a customer of Husky, is one of the largest plastics packaging producers.

It makes containers ranging from plastics beverage containers to food and personal care items.

Robert Cooper, Manager of Controls Engineering for Amcor's North American Office, led an initiative in 2003 to integrate all Amcor plant equipment into a factory wide Scada system for improved operational efficiencies.

At the time, there was no commercial way to provide connectivity from the Scada system to Husky machines.

Amcor considered two options.

First, create a hardware interface to each different controller platform that would funnel data into a stand-alone system.

This presented a number of drawbacks.

The hardware based system required special programming for each machine.

It would be difficult to deploy at other plants.

It was not supportable by Husky.

Because it was hardware-based, it was more costly than software, and required different hardware configurations for each generation of Husky machine.

Amcor also considered using DDE (dynamic data exchange) offered by a third party company as part of its visualisation software package.

However DDE was known to be problematic when deployed over a network and using a non-standard visualisation tool did not fit with Amcor's policy.

When Husky released OPC, Amcor began testing it using the built-in OPC connector in its Scada system, and within months decided to standardise on this approach.

The OPC provided a number of benefits, including a standard Ethernet interface, and it was fully supported by Husky.

Amcor could employ central data amalgamation, with full network integration.

OPC was easily deployed to other plants.

OPC with Husky Host connected different generations of Husky machines with no additional effort, and no added hardware was required.

Cooper said: "Amcor's development approach is to build modularised object-oriented Scada systems using standards such as OPC".

"Based on the Husky Host interface with the Matrikon OPC server, we have developed an automation object that has all the communications, logic, scaling and interfacing required to connect to a Husky injection moulder which is housed in a single container and can be dropped into our Scada system like a plug in component".

"We were impressed by the benefits offered by OPC, and have standardised on the technology corporate-wide for all of our connectivity".

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