At PACK EXPO International this past November, OMAC, PLCOpen, and OPC foundation all had adjoining booths, the goal of which was to show PACK EXPO attendees how the standards of the three organizations work together to make packaging machinery integration easier. I recently talked with ProMach’s Mark Ruberg, a member of the OMAC Board of Directors, to catch up on how things are going these days at OMAC, the Organization for Machine Automation and Control. Here’s what I learned:
• Membership is growing steadily, and with the dues paid by members old and new, OMAC is in a better position to broadcast its activities. Especially helpful has been the work done by Aguero Associates in helping OMAC to fine tune its focus and to send out OMAC messages in the OMAC newsletter. A key focus now is bringing about broader adoption of ISA TR88.00.02.
• Ruberg says it’s helpful that Bosch Rexroth has shared some how-to tools on getting more mileage out of PackTags. Additions like this—on top of already established implementation guidelines from P&G, Nestle, Arla Foods, Rockwell-- make membership more valuable.
• Another key goal is tighter harmonization of OMAC’s Pack ML and PacTags with OPC UA. Why? Because OPC UA is all about universally accepted machine-to-machine communication. Chris Thomas of Axon, a ProMach company, is focused on this harmonization effort. ProMach offers up his time on these efforts for the sake of the general good. Axon, of course, has fully embraced PackML, and Thomas will be the first to admit that over the course of the first year, getting Axon PackML-compliant across the board took a lot of work. But now that they’ve got everything broken down in modules and have the code written and tested, they basically have a whole library of modules at their disposal, so when they put machine code together, what once took hours or a day or two might take four or five minutes. And then when the machine is out in the field it’s much easier for a service tech to troubleshoot because he’s looking at widely recognized standard code rather than a one-off code.
• Scheduled for March 15-16 is an OMAC first: Smart Packaging Automation with PackML & OPC UA. Held at the Microsoft Development Center in Copenhagen, this conference will include presentations by Arla Foods, Tetra Pack, Mettler Toledo, Norden, Microsoft, and others. The focus will be on showing how the PackML and OPC UA interface standard for machines can ensure optimal integration on the factory floor and between machines and supervisory control systems. Featuring discussion and demonstration of how standards can optimize line integration and OEE while reducing implementation costs and commissioning time, this conference intends to show how Industry 4.0 can be obtained with Smart Packaging Automation.
>>For details, go here
