Steel Industry Use Case

VDL Weweler designs, develops and produces trailing arms, among others, for the manufacturing of trailers, trucks, buses, and cars. The production line of VDL Weweler is fully automated including both machinery and robots. The focus within the SERENA project was to enable and test the developed predictive maintenance (PdM) techniques and scheduling for the proactive maintenance and parts replacement of the rolling milling machine. The rolling process is an essential part of the production process of trailing arms at VDL WEW. The segments (tools mounted on the rolling mill) suffer from wear. Therefore, they are protected and hardened by a coating layer. If this coating layer wears too much, the underlying segment steel is damaged, and the segment is probably lost. So timely exchange for re-coating is essential. Exchange is currently performed based on product count.

The SERENA deployment on this demonstrator includes a virtual gateway running on local servers overseeing data acquisition from on-site machinery and their communication to the SERENA platform. In the SERENA platform, RUL-based prediction of wear is performed triggering a new maintenance task to compensate for the identified wear, including inspection and if necessary, replacement of a part. The SERENA system aims to support the maintenance operator and possibly guide them on how to perform the inspection and maintenance activities on-site. In particular the SERENA components deployed include:

• Machine measurements from the Rolling Mill PLC are communicated to the Gateway
• The Measurement machine measures product dimensions. These are stored in a local SQL DB
• Gateway computer with NodeRed for preprocessing and forming JSON-LD
• SERENA Cloud on Dell “Infinite” Testbed
  • Mimosa data model
  • Data storage
  • Analytics
  • Scheduler
• Operator support system accessed through an iPad
• Predictive analytics and scheduling services accessible through the SERENA cloud

The target for VDLWEW is to increase the number of products produced by rolling mill machine and with a single set of segments, reducing the production cost by saving re-coating expenses and avoid exchange time. To achieve this objective, the target of the SERENA solutions was the identification of the remaining coating layer thickness in the production line. Hence, utterly the intended scope of VDL Weweler is to provide to their customers the same products (in terms of quality) but at a lower price, since the downtime for maintenance and part replacement at the rolling milling machine will be reduced along with the production costs while the products produced between consecutive maintenance stops will be increased.