Rockwell brings intelligence to the smart asset lifecycle
A machine is a critical component in an enterprise’s manufacturing facility, often found in the production line of a plant or factory. These pieces of equipment are industrial assets that need to be designed, operated and maintained.
Mattheus Bulho, senior vice president, software and control, Rockwell Automation, guided his keynote address audience through Rockwell Automation’s suite of FactoryTalk offerings to address the lifecycle of a production asset during Automation Fair this week in Anaheim, Calif.
“There’s a lot we’ve been doing with design,” explained Bulho. “We’re bringing modern DevOps to automation in our design platform.” With IT and OT [operational technology] converging, a large project might involve multiple people contributing to the same code base. All of those different code contributions need to be rectified and integrated before the machine is up and running. Operating the equipment before the code has been harmonized inflates the time, cost and effort to correct those problems. Having an environment in the cloud makes it easy to visualize conflicts from multiple code versions.
The second area comes in commissioning. FactoryTalk Logix Echo is a high-fidelity virtual representation of Logix. “It includes our I/O and our drives,” said Bulho. Through Rockwell Automation’s partnership with NVIDIA, multiple models from multiple providers can be brought together to simulate the control of an entire production line. “You can catch issues earlier, and it’s cheaper to correct them. We’re simplifying simulation at scale.” These same digital-twin and simulation models can act as a training gym to improve operations before the machine is even built.
“We’re also bringing Copilot capabilities with FactoryTalk Design Studio,” Bulho added. FactoryTalk Design Studio offers multiple personas capable of multiple tasks. “You can prompt-engineer FactoryTalk Design Studio to create context and explain content it has created,” said Bulho. Through the use of artificial intelligence (AI), prompt-engineering creates natural-language models to understand the intent of instructions. “Over time, it will create your code, unit-test it, and push it out.”
In addition to AI, software-defined automation (SDA) is enabled across the entire system, not just in terms of a form factor for a controller. “If you take FactoryTalk Design Studio, you don’t bind the I/O and the execution platform until later,” explained Bulho. “You create it in an object-oriented way. You can create one entity and then deploy to a single controller or multiple controllers. If you take our FLEXHA 5000 I/O platform, the physical layer is defined in software. And when designing your human-machine interface in our FactoryTalk Optix software, we do not ask a single question about the hardware you’re going to run on.”
Rockwell’s Armor technology allows machine builders to bring control closer to the application. “The idea is to simplify what it takes to construct the system and reduce the footprint of the cabinet—or eliminate it altogether,” said Bulho. “Our EtherNet/IP in-cabinet offering significantly reduces the terminations needed.”
Operation and maintenance
Once the machine is designed and installed, it needs to be operated and maintained. “It’s important that you have robust access to data,” explained Bulho. “We’ve been building information systems for a very long time. Smart objects that are native in our system, combined with information software like FactoryTalk Optix, give you full visibility into the performance of your equipment.”
FactoryTalk Optix also features a robust data ingress layer, noted Bulho. “It has very strong middleware and a great presentation layer to create content visualizations,” he explained. “With data-ready machines, you have the ability to gain insights very quickly.”
However, just knowing how things are performing isn’t enough. “You need to optimize how machines are performing,” added Bulho. “With FactoryTalk Analytics VisionAI, you use machine learning to teach the system what a good item looks like, so it can accurately determine when there’s a defect.”
Rockwell is also bringing autonomous control to life by enabling LogixAI to do control functions without having them pre-programmed. “LogixAI is machine learning with Logix that understands the relationships of control without having to program it,” Bulho explained.
GuardianAI is yet another layer of AI enablement. “It leverages the sensing you already have in your plants,” explained Bulho. Currently, a PowerFlex low-voltage variable-frequency drive can be tapped for data, but more devices will be equipped with those capabilities, Bulho predicted. “When you couple GuardianAI with Fiix and its predictive capabilities, you can automate and manage those predictive maintenance workflows.”
