Remote supervision of production processes in the food industry

This paper presents a remote monitoring system based on the SCADA model (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition), specifically developed for automated production processes in a food company. The goals defined for this project were the monitoring of three production lines and six silos of raw materials, along with the indication / evaluation of three performance measures demanded by the company: production rate, packed quantity and OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). The developed system should also include other typical SCADA functionalities, namely alarms management, process trending and data logging. The applied methodology involved the detailed analysis of the existing automation systems, the functional specification of the remote monitoring system and the corresponding implementation (using the LabVIEW platform), test and validation. The project took about six months and the system was successfully implemented in one of the company´s factories. All the objectives were achieved.