SCADA controls boost bakery production 60%

The new system, based on Mitsubishi PLCs and a Citect SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system, is enabling BakeMark to expand production of bread improvers from 17,500 to 27,500 tonnes per annum. It covers materials handling, storage, weighing, batching, blending and tracing of some 2,000 ingredients, as well as tracking over a million items through the factory. All existing plant I/O were retained, but the main processor was upgraded to the latest Mitsubishi Q series, while PLC to PLC comms were moved up to Ethernet, and a high quality server was installed with inbuilt redundancy via dual power supplies, memory and disc storage using six hard drives organised as two raid arrays. According to ATS managing director Geoffrey Graves: "The package we decided upon has proven to be the correct one, successfully handling all the requirements of what is a very large and complex project… We also benefited from the power of Citect's C-like language, and the ease of data access and interaction. What was most important though was Citect's distributed architecture, which proved perfect for dividing the plant control operation into two distinct areas. "As part of our strategy we developed two packages, Plant Manager and Line Manager, which uses Citect SCADA. Plant Manager handles all material imports, the ingredients preparation area and mixer additions. "It also provides admin facilities to handle recipe set-up, materials tracking and reporting… Line Manager PCs allow production scheduling on a line basis and also display all plant status information, together with maintenance and set-up." Improved plant visibility means much better traceability of materials and locations, and also facilities such that even inexperienced operators can quickly pinpoint plant malfunctions. Says Graves: "Advanced alarm facilities are included but these are supplemented by on-screen status monitoring and diagnostics for each plant item showing current status."