Old and new devices unite under OPC

By Carlos Sanchez, Husky Injection Molding Systems

THE NEW control system that an industrial OEM embeds in its next-generation machine eventually becomes yesterday’s technology. The time comes when the machine builder finds value for itself and its customers by moving to newer, more capable control schemes and platforms. Repeat that sequence a few times, and a loyal, growing customer might find itself with several generations worth of machine controls on its factory floor.

What do they do when monitoring and data sharing between all these machines becomes an important operating need? Differing generations of controls means many machines can’t natively share data. The manufacturer can’t just dynamite his factory floor, and upgrade all the controls to fix the problem.

This is the customer-support issue that faced us at Husky Injection Molding Systems. In response, we developed Husky Host, a protocol to provide an interface for applications needing to communicate with any type of Husky equipment.

Machine Generations
With global headquarters in Bolton, Ontario, Canada, Husky is a leading supplier of injection molding equipment and services to the plastics industry (See Figure 1 below). Our company designs and manufactures a comprehensive equipment range, including machines, molds, hot runners and robots. We also offer value-added services such as factory planning, customer training, and system integration. Husky’s customers produce a variety of plastic products for the food and beverage, medical, automotive, and consumer electronics markets.

During its more than 50 years in the industry, Husky has introduced successive generations of injection-molding equipment to deliver improved performance and functionality. A new machine often would be packaged with a new controller platform that offered increased functionality, more memory and storage, and different communication protocols.

“As a result, customers had to create new communications drivers to exchange data between the new controller and the existing control and monitoring applications,” says James Bolka, manager of Husky’s central services group. “This was a time-consuming and expensive proposition for customers that relied on third-party vendors to create the interfaces.”

	FIGURE 1: TALKING ACROSS THE GENERATION GAP
	In response to a need for newer generation machines such as this H120 to communicate with older Husky equipment, the company developed Husky Host, an OPC-based protocol that provided an interface for all its applications.

This issue had another downside: end-users who relied on vendors to supply the drivers were locked into that vendor’s software solutions. Without the resources or expertise to write their own drivers, they couldn’t change monitoring software without losing their connectivity to the Husky equipment. In essence, they were limited to the solution the vendor could offer.

Keep Customers Satisfied
Two years ago, customers began asking Husky for complete turnkey solutions that would provide equipment and plant-monitoring capabilities. Plant monitoring software provides several benefits, including access to real-time equipment status, trends displays, receipt of equipment-need notifications, process visualization, a view to machine performance reports, and data gathering for analysis.

“One option was to write a comprehensive monitoring application from scratch,” says Bolka. “We rejected that option, and looked for an application on the market. We also researched the market, and interviewed potential customers to learn about the functionality that they value. Some of the main requirements were flexibility, ease of use, and web enablement.” As part of this process, Bolka says Husky included its own criteria, which included the potential supplier’s corporate culture, company commitment, global support, and financial performance.

After a series of demos and pilot projects, Husky selected Matrikon’s web-based ProcessNet monitoring application. With a collection of more than 500 OPC products and interfaces and more than 100,000 installations worldwide, MatrikonOPC is reportedly the world's largest developer, trainer and distributor of OPC products, and is a charter member of the OPC Foundation.

“We branded the product as Husky SmartLink,” says Bolka, “and we developed an installation methodology and configuration to facilitate deployment of the turnkey solution. The SmartLink solution is intuitive to users, so little training is required.”

Old and New
Despite these gains, SmartLink was not yet the complete solution that customers needed from Husky. The firm also needed a way for customers to connect their different generations of Husky equipment to SmartLink. The company realized that its proprietary protocol wouldn’t allow them the necessary open connectivity into the application.

After researching alternatives, Husky chose OPC technology to provide the needed connectivity. OPC, originally an acronym for “OLE for process control,” with OLE being an acronym for “object linking and embedding,” is a standards-based software communications protocol, which provides a common data exchange method between industrial devices and applications. With SmartLink’s built-in OPC capabilities, OPC was a natural choice.