Acquisition system of process information based on a direct equipment interface

A product production system consists of multiple fabrication processes which generate information such as the time, status of equipment and operators, and the process information related to the inconsistently changing production line status need to be collected and supervised. Existing data collection systems are expensive, complex, and difficult to extend, maintain, and integrate with high-level systems, when increasing the lines or applying new process. In this paper, we propose a direct equipment interface that is based on an information collection system. The proposed method can obtain information of shop floor using the direct equipment interface such as the PLC and SIB (Sensor-based I/O Board) and be flexibly applied regardless of any changes such as changes of processes or an increase of the lines. The PLC-based interface collects digital information by connecting lines to the facility PMC using a PLC’s digital module; and obtains additional information by connecting various sensors to a PLC’s analog module. The SIB interface collects information using sensors from the general-purpose facilities without a controller. We introduce the case study that develops the information collection system using the direct equipment interface and provides supervising information from shop floor, thereby reducing the cycle time, lead time, and Work-In-Process.