Wireless enables assembly lines

802.11 LANs, RFID and sensors let factories peer into plant processes.

Manufacturers large and small are starting to cut the cords in their respective factories and plants. The installation of wireless sensors, RFID and 802.11-based wireless is helping these firms gain better insight into production processes, inventory and product movement.

Wireless sensors facilitate an architecture where machines, and even inanimate parts and products, can be connected and monitored. This lets manufacturers track the health of factory equipment, the movement of products along an assembly line and the delivery of inventory. Other companies are putting a combination of 802.11 and RFID technology to use, allowing for similar end-to-end product life-cycle tracking.

"Plants are moving away from being a single-purpose facility that produces the same thing all day long for distribution all over the world," says Robert Parker, an analyst with Manufacturing Insights, an IDC company that tracks IT trends in manufacturing.

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Manufacturers large and small are starting to cut the cords in their respective factories and plants. The installation of wireless sensors, RFID and 802.11-based wireless is helping these firms gain better insight into production processes, inventory and product movement.

Wireless sensors facilitate an architecture where machines, and even inanimate parts and products, can be connected and monitored. This lets manufacturers track the health of factory equipment, the movement of products along an assembly line and the delivery of inventory. Other companies are putting a combination of 802.11 and RFID technology to use, allowing for similar end-to-end product life-cycle tracking.

"Plants are moving away from being a single-purpose facility that produces the same thing all day long for distribution all over the world," says Robert Parker, an analyst with Manufacturing Insights, an IDC company that tracks IT trends in manufacturing.

The other push toward the use of wireless sensors in factory networks is to give companies the ability to remotely monitor and control what's going on in far-flung plants.

"Manufacturers are looking to get a compressive view of how all their operations are interconnected," Parker says. "If you have a more flexible plant, producing a lot of products spread out over a wide area, you may have to have expertise centralized into a few locations for supporting plant technologies. The challenge is how to remotely manage these things."

General Motors is deploying several wireless technologies to meet this challenge. GM is moving toward outfitting its plants with everything from sensor network technology, including RFID tags on its inventory, to mesh networks. The combination of these technologies will help GM track everything from the parts that go into GM vehicles to the robotic assembly device and other heavy equipment used to put the cars and trucks together.

"The issues that define e-manufacturing are: how real-time data is obtained and what you as a company do with this real-time data," says Pulak Bandyopadhyay, group manager for plant floor systems and control group in GM's Manufacturing Systems Research.

GM is starting to deploy sensor technology in its plants to measure the health of its manufacturing equipment. Devices can be deployed with stamp presses, conveyer belts and other types of machinery that measure vibration, heat and other factors that can be detected to predict when a machine might fail or require service. Having the ability to detect when a piece of machinery in a plant in Mexico might go down from a network operations center in Detroit will help GM save on maintenance costs.

GM also is looking into linking such plant floor gear with mesh-based network equipment. A mesh will let network transceiver equipment act as individual wireless routers, connecting any device to any device on the most available path. This would allow telemetry data to hop from node to node on the network, instead of all data tying back to a few wireless access points. The result would be a plant where equipment can be positioned anywhere and stay online without wires.