A real-time manufacturing information exchange application between programmable logic controllers over a fault-tolerant network

An increase during the last fifteen years in seeking opportunities in data acquisition, reporting, and integrated control systems in automated factory floor environments has gained high priority for Enterprises Information Systems strategies. Improvements on manufacturing effectiveness through systems automation and integration have evolved to a higher step of complexity. The use of controllers and communications networking for the implementation of supervisory control and data acquisition without an adequate design in terms of faults could result in systems not able to alert on faults generation or recover from faults. Automated manufacturing equipment based on Programmable Logic Controllers and integrated through a fault tolerant Ethernet-based network is one of those challenging areas.{09}Some manufacturing integrated systems have tools with their own graphical user interfaces but not necessarily showing operational information from other manufacturing tools in the same network.; This thesis presents a research on fault tolerant systems and the development of a fault tolerant communication network of programmable controllers with hybrid networking topologies to support operators in their manufacturing tasks of processing lot transactions and process monitoring. It describes the analysis process of tasks performed by operators, and describes the development of code logic for the controllers and configuration for the graphical user interface to achieve a fault tolerant network. It presents a usability test conducted to compare the performance and subjective satisfaction of the operators using the existing traditional method and the new information exchange application.