A leading pharmaceutical manufacturing company rolled out a new automatic guided vehicle (AGV) system at their facility including a large-scale Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS). The AGVs would bring raw material to the line either from the ASRS or the warehouse, and when material needed to be swapped, they would return material to the required locations.

The AGV scheduling was performed using an application developed by Corso Systems using Ignition’s Perspective Module. This allowed the operators to run the application from tablets on the line, monitor AGV status in the facility, request pickups/drop offs, and watch the automated schedules that came from the ERP system based on production requirements.

AGVs, ERP, PLCs, and Ignition

• ERP Integration

  • Production Schedule Integration to schedule AGVs to fulfill production requirements

  • Inventory tracking to update quantities as they are picked and placed at each location

  • On Demand Scheduling of AGVs backfilled the ERP system with information on material locations and quantities

  • Work Order Instruction and Bill of Material integration to display PDFs in the Ignition client

• AGV Platform Integration

  • Integration with the AGV Platform’s API to direct machines to the desired locations and pick/place the desired material

  • Full Digital Twin Integration on a development Ignition gateway to display data within the AGV’s Digital Twin platform

  • Configure which AGV units were assigned to which production lines

• Browser-Based Visualization using Ignition’s Perspective Module

  • Screens to monitor the entire production model from site, building, line, or cell level

  • Operator scheduling screens to perform on demand requests

  • Administrative scheduling screen for schedulers to monitor and adjust AGV schedules per the ERP system

  • Interface to trigger in-browser alerts for operators at specific work stations or production lines from anywhere in the plant

  • Work Order Instruction and Bill of Material integration to display PDFs in the Ignition client

• Allen Bradley PLC Integration

  • ControlLogix PLCs

  • CompactLogix PLCs

Data Integration Summary

Corso Systems worked with the customer to define the required API Integrations to talk to the AGV system—and determine where the relevant data was stored in the ERP system. Then, we built screens to view and manage the AGV schedules for each line, including assigning particular AGVs to production lines or taking them out of service for maintenance.

The screens were fully templatized, ultimately using three screens total to control the entire operation. This was accomplished with dynamic view bindings to show the required information and a popup to display PDF files for work order instructions and bills of material.

These screens included overall schedule views with Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) functionality similar to any modern web application, along with Alarming, and AGV Configuration.

We then integrated Inductive Automation’s Ignition with all of the required AGV Platform endpoints to make the screens function as required by the production team. All of this was implemented on a development environment integrated with the AGV platform’s digital twin simulator before it was moved to production after vetting all of the functionality.

Result

The result of this project was a fully featured AGV management layer on top of the AGV platform, accessible on any device in the facility. AGV Operation was simplified using Inductive Automation’s Ignition to manage all of the data and information. The project was structured for easy scalability.

Once the first production line had used the system for a couple of days, the customer requested that we roll it out to 6 additional lines with the next 30 days. Due to the overall architecture of the project, we were able to roll it out in 7 days after validating tags existed in the new lines’ PLCs. Then, we were able to get everything set up on the network—not an easy feat to accomplish in the pharmaceutical world in 7 days!

Featured Image - By Carmenter - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7838942