Industrial

OEM, Automated Filling Station

Bi-directional communication with shop-floor controllers for MES-type application, based on open and standardized architecture

 

Situation

Background

  • Automotive OEM plans to update filling station application.
  • In a first step, deployment in one location. Other locations to follow.
  • In parallel, the customer is working on a largescale deployment of cloud-based IoT platform. Ideally the solution architectures are compatible.

Business need

  • Customer does not want to deploy proprietary hardware for the new filling station application.
  • Instead, the customer decided to build the new filling station solution based on the new and open IoT platform architecture, using standardized interfaces and protocols.
  • The new solution shall be designed such that it scales easily.

Technical Requirements

  • Gateway component must support MQTT, for communication with local MQTT broker
  • Bi-directional data exchange, to implement MES-like functionality
  • Access to machine data from Siemens S7-300/400 PLCs (majority), plus a small number of Siemens S7-1200 PLCs
  • Security requirements, incl. user management with LDAP
OEM, Automated Filling Station
 

Solution

  • For a roll-out of the new filling station application, the customer decided to deploy 50+ instances of Softing‘s edgeConnector Siemens running on standard IPCs.
  • The customer uses the container management platform Red Hat OpenShift to manage the installation. For PoCs and test installations, the customer also uses portainer.
 

Benefits

  • Robust machine connectivity, bidirectional for MES-type application.
  • Flexible architecture based on standards, no vendor lock-in
  • Connectivity with PLCs can be management by standardized and well-known IT tools
  • Easy to scale and to migrate to other locations