Safe Route Control for liquid and solid materials
Engineering, control, monitoring and diagnostics of routes with SIMATIC Route Control
Pipeline networks and tank farms can be found in many areas of the process industry, especially in the chemical, petrochemical or the food and beverage industries. The control of material transports is often a challenge: changing materials, dynamic routes, simultaneous transports or cleaning processes in partial sections must be taken into account. SIMATIC Route Control extends the SIMATIC PCS 7 process control system with an efficient "navigation system" for your plant: an industry-neutral product for planning, controlling, monitoring and diagnosing routes for liquid and solid substances.
Automated route networking for various applications
SIMATIC Route Control is a program package for automated route management - for example for transporting liquid and solid materials in pipeline networks or on conveyor belts. Thanks to simple scalability, the option package covers different application sizes - from simple transports to complex route networks. The product is primarily an efficient tool to reduce the effort for engineering and the operation of process routes (paths). At the same time, the automated control of the paths increases safety. In the case of material requests, the optimal connection is determined, checked, controlled, monitored and observed via the continuous management of routes, materials and transports. In addition, the program package also takes material compatibilities into account, for example to prevent contamination.
SIMATIC Route Control (RC) fits homogeneously into both the operating and monitoring strategy and the engineering of SIMATIC PCS 7 and can also be retrofitted to existing automation projects. For small installations, the route management system can be installed either alone or together with the OS software on a single-station system. Distributed multi-user systems with client-server architecture (also redundant) are typical for the automation of process paths with SIMATIC Route Control. The RC server is based on the configuration database, its main task is the flexible route search based on configuration and runtime data. This data is supplemented by runtime information from the automation system that is relevant for the route search.
With SIMATIC Route Control, which can also be combined with SIMATIC BATCH, SIMATIC PCS 7 can automate not only the production processes and the associated warehouses, but also the connecting material transports. The system can handle simple transport routes as well as complex route networks. SIMATIC Route Control is particularly predestined for plants with numerous branched pipeline routes or extensive tank farms.
Preferred applications:
- Plants in the medium and upper output range with an extensive network of pathways and pipelines
- Frequent modifications and extensions of the route network incl. actuators and sensors
- Transport routes with high flexibility due to constantly changing materials or by dynamic specification of source and destination of material transport (incl. direction reversal for bidirectional transport routes)
- Many simultaneously running material transports
- Plant projects in combination with SIMATIC BATCH
With SIMATIC Route Control, simple transport processes, special transfer methods or even complex route combinations are possible at runtime. The specification of source and destination plant points in the route request is sufficient for the system to be able to determine, check, control and monitor transport routes and the route elements they contain. The possibility of using templates of sample plans (CFC, SFC) and user-specific modules considerably reduces the project engineering effort.
