Inductive Automation Blog

Project Summary:

Madkour Group needed to achieve Digital Transformation on the SCADA agriculture project infrastructure and automation system for the National Project for Developing the New Valley in Toshka. The project aims to reclaim one million acres outside of Cairo as part of Egypt’s overall plan to reclaim and cultivate three million acres in total. Leveraging Ignition’s scalable architecture, unlimited licensing, flexibility, and rapid development tools, Madkour established a central control building to easily operate, manage, and maintain a large number of sites, equipment, and facilities spread out across this vast desert area.

Problem:

The area that Madkour is cultivating — part of the South Valley Development, a vast area in southern Egypt, approximately 1,200 kilometers away from Cairo — was originally barren, with no soil, people, or water. Due to this distance, Madkour faced difficulties transporting materials and equipment to the site and eventually established facilities to produce brick, steel, and concrete locally. The logistics of the construction were substantial: Madkour excavated over 3.2 million cubic meters of rock, poured more than 252,000 cubic meters of concrete, and incorporated an extensive quantity of steel structures, totaling more than 1,852 tons.

Originally, the pump stations were operated manually, and with each station an hour apart, this setup was not feasible given the massive size of the SCADA agriculture project. This led to the idea of creating a control center to manage the entire area of Toshka. To accomplish this, Madkour needed a platform with no limitations that would allow them to begin from a small scale during the first phase, then expand to a larger scope in the subsequent phases, and ultimately encompass the entire project.

Madkour’s challenge was to build this scalable, customizable, and reliable central system that could comply with the Toshka project’s unusual requirements and large scale, all in a relatively short period of time.

Solution:

Madkour ended up choosing Ignition for its scalable architecture, unlimited licensing, flexibility, and rapid development tools. The Toshka control center is designed to monitor and control all elements of the irrigation system, which include more than 200 irrigation pump stations, five main lifting stations, 20 electrical MVSG, LV transformers and electrical panels, and more than 2,000 pivots. Using Perspective’s web-based UI flexibility, Madkour built dynamic templates backed by hierarchically structured UDTs. This iterative approach allowed them to deliver a scalable system in a short time.

Results:

The system now gathers real-time data from remote locations and provides the operations team with the reporting and analytic tools for making data-driven decisions.

Each pumping station can operate automatically as it pumps water into the main canal to supply the substations and agricultural areas in Toshka. If any issues arise, operators can react quickly and efficiently, accessing the Ignition system remotely from any mobile device. The system records events and alarms and stores them historically. The operator can display them either in real time or as analytical data to help with corrective actions.

Additionally, operators can easily monitor all the aspects of the station like production rates, electricity and water consumption, cost per cubic meter of water, as well as compare the performance of equipment, and make predictions based on historical data by combining data from the historian with real-time data.

The Ignition system interacts with the electrical signals and measurements of each station. This interaction extends to medium-voltage distributors and transformers, along with various vital signals and readings of the SCADA agriculture project.

Madkour’s development group has grown from one person at the beginning of the project to a team of ten. Over 4,000 workers were involved in Toshka across all companies, including other organizations working alongside Madkour.

Ignition reduced the costs overall, particularly in manpower. Madkour started the project with four operators working at a single station, and now, one operator can manage 10 stations.

By the end of 2024, Madkour will have reached a total of 167 irrigation stations, 1,811 pivots, and five water-pumping stations over an area of 200,000 acres. Madkour aims to reach 300 irrigation stations and over 3,400 pivots in the next two years with a total cultivated area of approximately 600,000 acres of the Toshka project’s goal of one million acres.

Start Date: August 2021

Deploy Date: March 2022

Project Scope:

Tags: To be extended 800K tags

Screens: 25

Clients: 20

Alarms: Around 150K

Devices used: Around 150 M580 Redundant PLCs - 13 WAGO PFC200 RTUs

Architectures used: Standard

Databases used: 3 MSSQL (HIS, GIS, Reports)

Historical data logged: Around 160K

Project Summary:

Murakami’s North American plant produces automotive side-view mirrors, processing plastic into assembled mirrors with included electronics. This project transformed Murakami Injection’s pen-and-paper logging process into a fully Ignition-powered system with automated production, scrap, downtime, and changeover tracking.

Problem:

Murakami’s Injection department was like a time capsule; operators recorded defects as tick marks on a piece of paper, manually printed palette labels using an SSH connection to a terminal server, and Injection department leads had to wrangle with an Access database of molds, parts, and defects.

Three main goals for the project were:

1. Eliminate all operator paperwork.
2. Track all production information (production, scrap, downtime, and changeover time).
3. Push real-time inventory information into Murakami’s ERP system.

Ignition powered this project — try it yourself for free.

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Solution:

Musson Industrial designed a database schema in order to build a logical relationship between presses, molds, cavities, parts, and scrap pairs. Perspective’s user interface allowed Murakami’s tooling department to manage all configuration in-house. Due to the fact that each mold had a variable number of cavities and each cavity was a member of multiple scrap groups, the user interface greatly benefited from Perspective’s dynamic capabilities. Connecting Murakami’s ERP system to Ignition aided the mapping of cavities to part numbers: available part numbers could be pulled directly from QAD, providing rigorous validation.

Ignition’s Mitsubishi Driver was used to connect over Ethernet to the 16 Mitsubishi FX3U PLCs installed on each of the 16 presses as a hardware interface. The Mitsubishi Driver allowed communications to be performed in Ignition without the need for a third-party OPC UA server.

A unique tag-driven navigation scheme allowed the left and right sides of the operator HMI to function entirely separately, with isolated authentication, navigation, and touchscreen keyboard capabilities.

Label printing was performed using the third-party software BarTender. Musson Industrial developed a BarTender module for Ignition to allow for configuration of BarTender connections from the inside the Gateway user interface and to expose scripting functions for triggering BarTender integrations. Musson Industrial also built a consolidated print station using Perspective to allow operators to scan Kanban barcodes to print palette labels.

Musson Industrial developed a wholly custom Perspective theme (pyro-mui-joy) alongside this project. The theme is an adaptation of Material UI’s Joy library designed to work with Perspective Style Classes. The custom theme allowed the user interface to be rapidly developed while achieving an attractive and consistent design language. The theme and all the associated tooling have been released under an open-source license here (pyro-mui-joy).

Results:

After the application went live, Murakami’s Injection department eliminated all operator paperwork. The logging of all ~2 million injection molded parts per month became a totally automatic process, with increased production, scrap, and downtime accuracy.

With all the Injection production and changeover information being collected in real-time, Murakami’s managers and team leaders have visibility into the true production capabilities of their department, allowing them to identify reasons for long changeover times, spot recurring defect patterns, and compare capabilities between shifts.

The production and scrap information is continuously submitted into Murakami’s ERP system hourly, ensuring accurate inventory for their just-in-time manufacturing methodology.

Start Date: March 2023

Deploy Date: November 2023

Project Scope:

Tags: 1,375

Screens: 30

Clients: 9 Perspective Workstations for operators, + unlimited Perspective sessions for managers/team leaders

Alarms: 0

Devices used: 16 Mitsubishi FX3U PLCs, 1 Zebra printer

Architectures used: Standard

Databases used: 1 Microsoft SQL Database, 1 Progress OpenEdge Database (QAD ERP)

Historical data logged: 2 million rows per month (45 parts per minute), production totals submitted to ERP hourly

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