Automotive

How does an automotive plant-floor network integration engagement work?

We engineer the deterministic networks, test systems and protocol bridges under an automotive production line.

This is for vehicle OEMs, their tier suppliers, and the MES vendors and line integrators delivering into those plants. You keep the line, the plant relationship and the production schedule; we take the parts that need a standing specialism:

• deterministic segments for robot cells, conveyors and vision stations over PROFINET (IEC 61158) and IEEE 802.1 TSN, engineered to a cycle-time budget
• gateways and protocol bridges between new cells and an installed base of PLCs, drives and legacy fieldbus
• end-of-line and in-process testers, covering firmware, fixture control and the results pipeline into MES
• the station-level capture path that carries per-part genealogy upward over OPC UA
• safety communication on the control network, taken through pre-certification testing
• training your engineers on the technology, building the first implementation with them, then third-line support behind their first line

We do not commission lines on the plant floor. That belongs to the integrator or the plant’s own engineering group. Where the work has to be integrated and tested, our team works with your engineers, onshore during integration and test and remotely for the rest. The engagement page sets out the modes and how they are priced.

A vehicle plant is never greenfield: mixed-generation networks, rising variant counts and traceability mandates all land on the same floor at once. The layer we build is what lets capability be added to that floor incrementally, so production keeps running while it changes. This page covers the plant. The electronics inside the vehicle, meaning CAN, LIN, Automotive Ethernet, diagnostics and the ECU software around them, are a different discipline and have their own page on automotive electronics.

Who do you usually engage with on a plant programme?

Often a platform vendor instead of the plant itself.

An MES supplier winning a line needs the layer beneath their product built and proven: PLCs, I/O devices and gateways spanning legacy and current networks, with the floor data streams merged and presented in a form their platform can consume. That is the part we build. Digesting the data is their product, and the customer relationship stays with them. The same applies to line integrators and to tier suppliers’ manufacturing engineering groups. We are the engineering bench behind the delivery, not a competing bidder for it. That also decides how the work is staffed: our engineers sit with yours during integration and test, and the people on the plant floor are still your people.

How do new lines exchange data with installed plant equipment?

Most plants run several protocol generations side by side, and that usually needs a bridge, not a migration.

PROFINET on European floors, EtherNet/IP on North American ones, EtherCAT where a cell needs tight coordinated motion, and legacy fieldbus on installed machinery that is not moving. Instead of a forklift upgrade of the floor, we design protocol gateways and bridges that let new deterministic lines exchange data with existing PLCs and drives, and engineer the TSN and industrial-Ethernet segments to hold their cycle-time budget as cells are added. What we hand over is a device and a design; putting it on the floor is the integrator’s step.

How do you hold end-of-line test throughput as variants multiply?

We engineer the tester firmware, fixture control and results pipeline so coverage grows without stretching cycle time.

EOL testers turn into the bottleneck when every vehicle is a variant. Three things keep the cycle time flat:

• Parameterised test sequences per variant.
• Deterministic fixture I/O.
• Pass/fail and measurement data streamed straight into MES.

How is per-part traceability captured without slowing the line?

We instrument stations to publish part-level data over OPC UA (IEC 62541) into an ISA-95 MES layer.

The genealogy in question is per-part build genealogy: which components, which process settings and which test results went into each individual part, and into the vehicle it ended up in. It is what a targeted recall runs on, which is why the traceability expectations in the automotive quality standards reach every station from press shop to dispatch, well beyond final assembly. Each part therefore carries a complete build record, captured in the background of the normal station cycle, not as an added test step.

How do you keep the traceability path from disturbing the cells?

We separate them in the network design.

A station publishing per-part genealogy sits on the same infrastructure as the cell’s motion traffic, and the two have nothing in common except the wire. The design question is whether the traceability path can be added, extended and occasionally broken without any of that reaching the cell.

• How it is done. The segmentation has to be settled before the data question, and IEC 62443 is the standard that defines how: zones with a declared conduit between them, in place of a flat floor where an MES query and a drive setpoint traverse the same path.
• Why it pays off. It is what makes the traceability layer safe to change, and that matters because traceability requirements change far more often than robot cells do.
• What it is not. This is segmentation of the plant network, a different subject from the zonal E/E architecture inside the vehicle, covered on the automotive electronics page.

Where does safety communication sit on a line?

On the control network, in most modern builds.

A safety protocol carries its own integrity checks end to end, so the network beneath it does not have to be trusted and a second physical network is no longer the default answer. Robot cells make this a design task, rather than inheriting: guarding, interlocks and e-stops are re-arranged whenever a cell is re-tooled, and the safety communication has to stay provable across each change. Our part is the communication layer and the pre-certification testing that exercises it. Our team has ported a bus-independent safety profile onto a customer’s own board and taken it through SIL2 pre-certification. The certificate itself is an accredited body’s to issue, and the safety case for an installed line stays with whoever owns that installation.