OSSTjWin: NEW VERSION AVAILABLE

PALCON in Malaysia, the development centre for the OSSTjWin, PAL’s widely used ordering and monitoring system, has now been in operation for more than three years. The development team has been working hard to release new versions. Besides minor features, the next version released this September, contains the following major features:

• Flashback

  This is a very powerful tool enabling the user to re-play the past 24 hours, in real time or in a higher speed format. All transporter movements and flightbar locations, with their data, can be monitored, using the same function that is normally used during production. The user can explore it like a video/DVD player and pause, play step-by-step forward/backward with the selected speed, play forward/ backward in real time or at a higher, selectable speed. The user can easily search for a certain time of the day or just move a time ‘slide bar?to the required time slot.

  The advantage of this function is to find the cause of all sorts of problems, such as when:

  • a flightbar was manually moved by mistake from one station to another, not following the correct sequence, causing rejects.
  • no flightbars were loaded into the machine, causing low output and maybe a ‘log-jam?situation at the end of the line.
  • a lock or log-jam situation, which happened due to a process sequence being wrongly set-up.

    
    Example of flashback screen

• A built-in basic MMI (Man Machine Interface)

  This is like a stand-alone software package, fully integrated in the OSSTjWin. There are two different purposes of this function: The normal purpose is to customise the screens with the equipment around the tanks, like filter pumps and sump tanks with their pumps and valves. The second purpose is, if there is a small or medium sized waste water treatment for the line, it could be included in the same control system with obvious cost saving.

  Those screens can be designed by PAL engineers, or even by the customers themselves. There is a basic, but powerful, built-in editor to design the screens. There are standard symbols like tanks, pumps, valves etc., where each object can have an associated "tag" to indicate its status (volume for tanks, different colours for off/on/alarm status on other objects). Each object can have a "link screen", when, by clicking on the object, the other screen is displayed. The users can also create their own symbols, which can change shape depending on the status of the "tag" variable

  Besides the advantages of customising the screens for the line, the advantages of this function, when used for a waste water treatment are:

  • cost savings, no need to buy another control system and MMI package
  • the users are familiar with the system, since it is the same software package for both the line and for the waster water treatment

    
    Example of the built-in MMI

• Side Equipment Function

  This function will collect standard side equipment instruments for each station and display them on a separate screen. By clicking on a tank, all associated instruments for this tank like temperature meters, rectifier meters, switches etc., will be displayed.

• Predict Cycle Scheduler

  This new scheduler is based on a fixed cycle (a time/way diagram). The fixed cycle ensures a high output but with some limitations in mixing different products. Even though, in a sub-cycle (e.g. zinc), the time can be individually set on any multiple of cycle time. For example, if the cycle time is 6 minutes, the zinc plating time could be set to 6, 12, 18, 24, etc., minutes.

  The "Predictive" part is that the user can enter the production list for the day, select priority for the different orders to be run, and finally select "Optimise". The system will optimise the usage of the line in the best way, trying to keep the sub-cycle (e.g. zinc) as much used as possible, with its different plating times. The user will also get the information about when each order will be finished!

  Another feature is that the user can enter the production list for next day, just to see when the different orders will be finished. And when running with any particular production list, the user can try to re-optimise it, changing priorities and/or adding other orders to the production list, to see the impact. Then the user can select "Go" or cancel this new production list optimisation.

  
  Example of the Predictive Cycle function