Slashdot Mirror
An IT Infrastructure for Automotive Manufacturing?
papa248 asks: "I have moved into a Launch Project Manager position within my company. The business is with automotive component manufacturing in a Just-In-Time scale, located in the heart of the Motor City. My job will be to facilitate the setup of IT systems in a new assembly plant. This would be office systems, customer broadcast (parts are sequenced so they arrive at the OEM to match a particular vehicle's VIN), shop floor systems for robotic control, PLCs for error-proofing, lot traceability, the whole nine yards. The company (large, Fortune 500) has some very specific specifications for office systems (HP hardware, Windows, Office, etc) but leaves lots of opportunity for the actual production systems. I've been burned in the past because my predecessors have used 'turnkey' solutions from some lesser known, local vendors that write such custom, specific code on ridiculous, non standard PCs and hardware. I'm in a jam right now, because I've got tons of NT4 systems with a semi-custom OS and VB 6 code on it that are literally falling apart. What are your suggestions for setting up manufacturing control systems that leave the flexibility to be upgradeable and redesignable without being locked in to one particular vendor or solution?"
From OSI Software.
"While the submitter has every right to want the systems to be 'standard' PCs, The controller cards for talking to the PLCs are probably the only unique thing in the box. The controllers are expensive for a reason."
That depends. Most of the "it can kill" level stuff happens at the PLC, which is mounted either near the controlled equipment, or centralized in the equipment room. The higher level stuff the majority of the time is for monitoring.* And that's were the standard PC's come in.
*When it came to programming the PLC. We did that on a laptop in the equipment room...running on Windows.