The process industry is facing harsh global competition and changing market requirements such as more customised products, shorter delivery times and smaller batch series down to batch size 1.
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This goes hand in hand with an accelerating pace of innovation. ABB has developed modular automation technology to help module vendors and plant owners meet these demands.
Moving from monolithic automation systems for complete production plants to modular-enabled, more flexible and service oriented solutions will allow faster process implementation, ability to scale the capacity by numbering up and down the production and improved capability and speed of product changes.
ABB has developed a solution for modularisation with plug and produce capabilities and a pilot is currently ongoing with major life science company, Bayer AG. Several so called Module Type Package (MTP) control sub systems and a modular configuration tool have been delivered and are currently running with a modular-enabled ABB Ability System 800xA for the orchestration.
According to Dr. Torsten Knohl, Senior Project Manager at Bayer AG, “Modular Automation is very important for future production plants and the corner stone for IoT and Industry 4.0. We have chosen ABB as a technology provider because we have a longstanding relationship based on cooperation. Further to this, ABB is a strong partner in automation systems, offering solutions with few automation loops as well as big package units.”
Modular process plants will have pre-automated modular units that can be added, arranged and adjusted according to the production needs. Distributed Control Systems (DCS) will evolve to orchestration systems that manage the operation of the modular units. This is achieved through the Module Type Package (MTP), a standardised methodology enabling interoperability between any module and orchestration system developed within the MTP framework.
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