A Concept for an Operational Management System for Industrial Purposes

Today manufacturing is highly decentralized from the company headquarters to local Production sites, taking advantages from local resources such as labor costs, raw materials, infrastructures, etc. Additionally it is common to build large scale infrastructures in order to take advantage from economic scale factors. Huge factories imply great number of production lines that are distributed along big surfaces. This decentralized environment increases the need for complex management tools that enable a complete on-line overview about the system state. This paper presents a concept for an industrial operational management tool that incorporates low-level communications between processes - PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) and remote communication between system administrator and production processes, via internet, GSM mobile communications, etc. This concept is a two layer management architecture where inner loops are performed by low level PLC Master-Slave networks and the outer loop is performed by a SCADA system (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition).