Production planning and monitoring for a batch process

Production planning and monitoring is needed for most of the batch processes to support production reporting, quality management, traceability, and process development. This document describes one example how such functionalities can be implemented with the tooling of ABB Ability™ History.

We have a cookie factory with one production line from dough mixer until cookie packager and pallet handling. For preparing different types of cookies we need recipes, planning when to produce what, actual batch production that is controlled from raw materials dosing through dough making and baking to packaging with sensors to collect measurements.

The application contains modeling of the process including the production equipment and recipes, connections to the automation to control and collect data, calculations to calculate the analyses for each produced batch, dashboards to create and maintain recipes, dashboard to prepare production plan, and dashboards to monitor and report production.

The equipment models, calculations, and dashboards provided in this article shall not be taken as production-ready quality, but they can be freely re-used for developing real application. They are aimed to provide a good starting point for understanding the core ideas and implementation details.

Table of contents

• Part 1 - Production line modeling describes our production line and how to model it.
• Part 2 - Creating Equipment model describes how equipment classes, properties and instances can be configured with Engineering UI.
• Part 3 - Calculations describes how to to create calculations in our Calc Catalog and provides code examples we used to create Cookie factory application.
• Part 4 - User Interface shows what dashboards we created for our example and provides basic knowledge how to create similar displays.
• How-to guide: In addition, we created a separate tutorial on how to create a dashboard for tracking batches and property values within.