K&N Engineering in Riverside, California, is the inventor and leading innovator of reusable cotton gauze filter technology for automotive applications. The 280,000 square-foot K&N facility has a multi-level closed loop conveyor system consisting of about 1600 I/O and 100 barcode scanners. In addition to the normal conveyor controls, the conveyor control system (CCS) interacts with K&N’s business management system (BMS), a SQL server-based platform. The CCS continuously reads and writes data such as route data, arrival data, and conveyor status are communicated to the BMS as it manages hundreds of totes simultaneously.
EA was hired to program the CCS and had to work with three major technical challenges. First, the CCS needed to handle approximately 1.7 million SQL transactions per day. The BMS which is primarily responsible for routing totes within the closed-loop system, can reroute totes at any time, adding complexity to the transaction processing. Additionally, since the system was designed without a human-machine interface (HMI), the SQL transactions must also include extra information about alarms, warnings, and statuses, such as emergency stops, jams, and queue levels.
The second challenge involved updating 100 barcode scanners at least 10 times per second. Additionally, there were 1,600 points of distributed input/output (I/O) that required updates at least 30 times per second.
To solve the challenge of SQL throughput, Enterprise Automation engineers and Think and Do developers developed as custom extended function block (EFB) to handle the SQL transactions. By integrating the EFB directly into Think and Do, they achieved the objective of having a single software solution.
To achieve the necessary update rates for the barcode readers, they combined SICK barcode scanners with an array of Digi PortServers connected to Think and Do via Ethernet. Finally, to ensure rapid polling of the I/O, Enterprise Automation configured Automation Direct Terminator I/O, which communicates over high-speed Ethernet and is distributed across 25 I/O panels.
Enterprise Automation
9050 Irvine Center Drive, Ste 200
Irvine, CA 92618
Phone 949.769.6000
Fax 949.769.6005
