Conveyor IIoT Digitisation

Context & Aim

An electronics manufacturing company needed operational data from the constituent components of their conveyor system in order to maximise its efficiency and to help prove/disprove various hypothesis around the operation of the conveyor.

Challenge

Measure the following datapoints on each conveyor station:

Average throughput per hour for current day – Monday to Sat 8am to 8pm.
Running total for current day.
Average hourly throughput for previous day.
Total throughput for previous day.
Peak throughput for any single hour – detailing date and time.
Generate alarms and notification to line supervisors in the event of out of range operational data.
Measure and log environmental data – temperature / humidity / particle counts.
Provide visual feedback to the conveyor operatives and management.

Solution

By leveraging the IMR IIoT toolkit, a mesh network of low cost laser sensors were developed and placed on entry and exit points at each station along the conveyor line.
All sensors communicated data back to a gateway which transmitted the data to an application server and database.
The data was computed, analysed and visualised in various graphs and counts to allow simple interpretation of the data for the end user and the detection and notification of anomalies through the use of a complex event processor.