Market: Factory Automation China

Project Introduction: China's thriving car market is nurturing a huge local automotive manufacturing industry, with a total of 18 million cars made in China during 2010, which presents 30% year-over-year growth. Advantech's customer is a system integrator providing solutions for automatic production control and management to China's top motor manufacturers. They focus on production lines of driveline parts including gearboxes and engines. In this application story, the client found that Advantech's Ethernet networking solution met their system requirements perfectly.

System Requirements:
Solutions for Executive & Management Systems (EMS) and Assembly Management Systems (AMS) for motor manufacturers and parts producers require the support of automatic control and information technologies to achieve real time production monitoring, equipment processing parameter setting, product quality management, data archiving & backup and remote user management.

A solid and reliable communication network is critical for carrying out all these functions. To ensure dependability, the network must be designed to take into account the necessary level of redundancy including: a self-healing X-Ring of Ethernet managed switches, which provides a redundant network path in the event of a failure on the network or similar problem; also required is a redundant power supply to provide backup in-case of a catastrophic power failure.

When it's essential that equipment is continuously monitored and delays in data transmission could cause time delays, faster bandwidth is critical, as is the reliability of the data equipment, since it must continue to operate in areas of extreme temperature.

Project Implementation:

EKI-7659C	8+2G Combo Port Gigabit Managed Redundant Industrial Ethernet Switch
EKI-7656C	16+2G Combo Port Gigabit Managed Redundant Industrial Ethernet Switch
EKI-2528	8-port Unmanaged Industrial Ethernet Switch
EKI-2525	5-port Unmanaged Industrial Ethernet Switch
EKI-6311GN	IEEE 802.11 b/g/n Wireless Access Point/Client Bridge

System Diagram:

System Description:
Our customer's solution for motor driveline workshops consists of a device level, a control level and an information level, which communicate via a fiber optic network.

The backbone of the network is supported by Advantech's industrial managed Ethernet switches of EKI-7659C or EKI-7656C, which support Advantech's proprietary redundant network protocol -- X-Ring that provides users with an easy way to establish a redundant Ethernet network with ultra high-speed recovery time of less than 10ms.

The EKI-7659C/EKI-7656C also comes with a wide variety of ports and supports the unusual function of "port trunking", that is, the grouping of two or more ports together and working as a logical path to increase bandwidth between two cascaded switches.

At the lowest level of the topology, a number of Advantech's EKI-2528 or EKI-2525 switches are deployed to connect with Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) which command and control manufacturing equipment. The EKI-2528/EKI-2525 provides redundant power input design, and is secured with a double protection mechanism: Power Polarity Reverse Protect and an Overload Current Resetable Fuse. The former tolerates reverse power wiring and the latter secures the system from overload currents.

The upper level of the application architecture-the information system for the supervisors-is supported by EKI-6311GN, a wireless AP that provides a reliable wireless environment for industrial building systems to allow for remote real time monitoring over the production lines.

Conclusion:
Advantech's Managed and unmanaged Ethernet switches used in this application - with the support of dual power inputs, wide temperature, rapid self-healing X-Ring and port-trunking capabilities - provide optimum network performance and security.

After our customer substituted their original switches with Advantech Ethernet switch and wireless AP products, they found the switches are compatible with different brands of PLCs, and the whole system still operates correctly. By using Advantech products they've saved money without sacrificing system performance.

This case study is further evidence that Advantech is able to provide a variety of models for our customers' choice to meet their specific needs.