Industrial building services control and Industry 4.

0
To manage building services and utilities efficiently, in an industrial
plant, facility managers need to be increasingly aware of changing
operational activity.

Interdependency
For example, if an additional shift is required to perform rework or to
meet a hot-shot order, appropriate facilities will be required and
utility performance will deviate from the norm. Likewise, if plant
downtime occurs, as a result of a machine breakdown or because of a
quality issue, utility consumption would be expected to fall.
Moreover, in an effort to minimise cost and to adopt sustainable
practice, businesses are increasingly harvesting waste heat from
production processes to provide space heating and domestic hot
water, thus improving energy efficiency. Hence, the production
process, building services and the provision of utilities (for people &
processes) are becoming increasingly entwined.

Hidden stories, missed opportunities

Frequently however, data relating to production activity, facility
operation and utility consumption is held in different systems. Often
no single view is available that combines this data and consequently
analytical techniques, like machine learning, can’t be used to highlight
inefficiencies. Opportunities to avoid waste are thus obscured.

Copyright TR Control Solutions Ltd 2018

Take the case of one of our industrial manufacturing customers who
monitor, in real-time, the performance of their production lines using
a reporting system which captures and categorises plant downtime,
performance and quality.
Production directors, managers, supervisors and operators have a
real-time picture of performance on their desktops, via shop-floor
digital displays and on their mobile phones and this is further
supplemented with real-time alerts when their immediate attention is
required.
On the other hand, their colleagues in the facilities department have
had to wrestle with standalone HVAC controllers, manual meter
reading and if they are lucky, a monthly fiscal energy consumption
report.

Facilities management system independent of production management system

Copyright TR Control Solutions Ltd 2018

Opportunity provided by Interoperability
But this needn’t be the case and because of the development of
software that facilitates interoperability, providing a SPoG (single
pane of glass) application is relatively straightforward.
By integrating building management system (BMS) controllers and
utility meters, using the interoperability provided by OPC UA (the
machine to machine communication protocol), BACnet (the BMS
industry’s standard protocol) and Modbus or M-Bus, with the plant
production reporting system, a single, Industry 4.0 platform can be
provided. This platform is able to present a transparent view of
production, associated building service and utility performance.
Thus, production and facility managers are able to operate the plant
in collaboration rather than in isolation, with the central system
providing a single picture of combined performance.

Integrated facilities and production management information system

Copyright TR Control Solutions Ltd 2018