Premier Foods Salt River Mill upgrade

September 2005 System Integration & Control Systems Design

Premier Foods Salt River Mill has been running for more than 30 years. Essentially the mill converts wheat into flour and is attached to a large Blue Ribbon bakery. The original PLC system architecture was based on a token ring network of which the hardware components have become obsolete. Furthermore the scada architecture at the time of tender was not locally supported. The urgency of the upgrade would render immediate spare PLC components.

A decision was made to keep the PLC vender (Omron) and upgrade using its latest technologies (CJ1G CPU with Ethernet IP). Wonderware was chosen as the preferred architecture for the management information system (MIS) and its Industrial Application Server (ArchestrA) as the redundant plant layer to facilitate a speedy upgrade path and ensure a solid standard for the Premier Foods Group (using intelligent objects and symbols).

The Omron PLC architecture allowed for a serial communication link to its existing fibre-optic token ring network. This gave an immediate gateway to the inter-PLC communication database. This means as each PLC node is replaced a stable network backbone is maintained.

ArchestrA was the preferred choice because Wonderware's Industrial Application Server allows for a scalable single application development environment using object-based technologies to create a process model of the entire factory. ArchestrA uses Microsoft .Net's software development platform, providing seamless integration between operations and business intelligence. This ensures fast, uninterrupted application development to the existing realtime platform.

Industrial SQL Server is the chosen Historian and when used together with ArchestrA is a mere filling-in-the-blanks process. This database compression engine uses Microsoft SQL server technology as its backbone.

Hirschmann intelligent industrial Ethernet switches have been selected for the upgraded copper and fibre-optic LAN. It provided easy to use configuration software tools to aid in the set up and implementation.

Issues addressed

The issues arising involved serial communications to the legacy weighing systems. This was achieved easily through the use of an Omron universal communication card allowing easy protocol macros to be developed and downloaded.

For more information contact Andrew Rennie, AMR Automations, 021 534 0838, [email protected], www.amr.co.za

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