Plastics & Injection Molding

How does a EUROMAP OPC UA injection molding integration engagement work?

We engineer the data interfaces of plastics and rubber machinery cells.

This is for the machine vendors, integrators and MES suppliers whose products they are. You keep the machine, the plant relationship and the software your customer bought; we take the interface layer:

• EUROMAP 77 machine-to-MES and EUROMAP 79 robot interfaces, built into the machine or consumed during integration
• the rest of the cell mapped into one OPC UA address space, so the MES sees one cell instead of multiple devices
• a gateway route onto OPC UA for installed machines still exchanging data as files
• an aggregating server or gateway where an ERP or group reporting layer has to subscribe to many machines at once
• training your engineers on OPC UA and information modelling, building the first implementation with them, then third-line support behind their first line

We do not install or commission cells on a moulder’s floor. Where the interface 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.

The reason moulding connectivity stalls is rarely the moulding machine. It is that a cell is four suppliers’ equipment and two interface generations, and the MES was specified against a clean version of neither.

What changed when EUROMAP moved from file exchange to OPC UA?

EUROMAP 63 exchanges files on a shared directory; EUROMAP 77 is a live OPC UA model instead.

The machine writes files, something else reads them, and it works well enough for shift reporting. It was never built for cycle-level monitoring or for reacting to an event while the cycle is still running. EUROMAP 77, at Release 1.01, gives a live OPC UA information model of the machine, which the MES can browse and subscribe to. Cell state arrives as structured, timestamped data rather than a parsed file, per-cycle parameters become visible, and event-driven reaction becomes possible. The practical consequence is that a new integration stops being a one-off parser, which is also why an installed base of 63 machines is better gatewayed than replaced.

How OPC UA and the EUROMAP specifications fit together, as grammar and vocabulary, is drawn under What are the EUROMAP specifications?.

What are the EUROMAP specifications?

EUROMAP specifications are OPC UA companion specifications, published jointly with the OPC Foundation.

OPC UA itself (IEC 62541) supplies the address space, the type system and the services; a companion specification supplies the vocabulary for one kind of machine, so that two vendors’ injection moulding machines describe themselves the same way and an MES can consume either without a custom mapping. Within the family:

• EUROMAP 83 carries the general type definitions the others build on.
• EUROMAP 77 covers the machine-to-MES interface.
• EUROMAP 79 covers the robot and handling-device relationship.
• The EUROMAP 82 series covers the peripheral devices around the cell.
• The EUROMAP 84 series covers extrusion lines.

Knowing which specification owns which part of a cell is most of the scoping conversation, because a gap in that map is where a custom interface ends up being written.

Which slices of the work can you support?

Any one of the interfaces around the cell: the machine's own, the peripherals, an installed EUROMAP 63 machine.

• A companion-spec interface. On your machine. An OPC UA server built into the product, modelled to EUROMAP 77 over the EUROMAP 83 types, so the machine arrives on site already speaking what the MES expects.
• Multi-vendor integration. The same modelling work from the other side, where the job is making a mixed installed base present one interface upward.
• The cell around the machine. Robot, dryer, temperature control and material handling brought into one address space.
• An installed EUROMAP 63 machine. A gateway route onto OPC UA without touching the controller.
• One ERP, many machines. One aggregating endpoint instead of an integration per machine.
• Team bring-up. Your own engineers brought up to speed. Training on OPC UA and information modelling, then building the first implementation alongside your team.

How is the information model built onto the machine?

We build it on an open-source stack, against the companion specification.

It is then integrated into the machine so third-party consumers can rely on it. As an example, our team built an OPC UA information model for a plastics and rubber machine on open62541, the open-source OPC UA stack supported by OSADL, and integrated it onto the machine so that the customer’s own third-party consumers, an MES among them, could pull data from it reliably. The request came jointly from the machine vendor and the plant running it, which is the usual arrangement when an interface has to satisfy both the builder and whoever the builder’s customer has already bought software from. Our team has also produced a EUROMAP 79 robot information model using our own modelling tooling, published for any other user to start from. EUROMAP 79 is still at release-candidate status, which matters before a programme commits to it.

How does the rest of the cell get onto one interface?

The companion specifications reach most of it, and a gateway covers the rest.

A moulding cell is the machine plus a robot, a dryer, temperature control and often material handling, each with its own protocol and its own idea of what a cycle is.

• EUROMAP 79 covers the robot relationship directly.
• The EUROMAP 82 series covers peripheral devices.
• Everything no companion specification reaches is mapped into the same OPC UA address space through a gateway.

The MES then sees one cell instead of multiple devices it has to correlate.

How do you keep the data path out of the control loop?

Data collection sits beside the control loop and reads state the controller already produces.

The machine’s own control loop stays untouched. The collection path publishes on its own schedule and never inserts itself into the cycle-critical path. That separation is what lets monitoring, MES connectivity and later analytics be added to a running cell without a fresh validation of the machine’s timing.

How does an ERP subscribe to machines across several factories?

One endpoint serves them all, instead of one integration per machine.

It can be done in two ways:

• An OPC UA aggregating server acts as a client to the machines’ own OPC UA servers and re-exposes their nodes in a single address space, which is the right choice once the machines speak OPC UA natively.
• An aggregating gateway does the same job but converts first, which is what a mixed estate needs while EUROMAP 63 machines are still in it.

In practice a plastics group has both, and the gateway feeds the server’s address space. Our team has built central OPC UA gateways of this kind, letting a remote enterprise system subscribe to several machines at once instead of each being wired up separately. Across sites the modelling is the easy half. The harder questions are transport and segmentation: which network the subscription crosses, what is exposed at each site boundary, and how the path is kept separate from anything the cells depend on. That is the same discipline as the control-and-data separation above, applied at the plant boundary instead of the machine.