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Mitsubishi Electric introduced its e-F@ctory manufacturing solution for all industries at the 12th Annual ARC Forum in Orlando, USA. Constituting the company’s vision for manufacturing, e-F@ctory unifies Mitsubishi’s control hardware and networks with enterprise IT systems offered by strategic partner companies, including IBM and ILST.
Mitsubishi Electric claims the e-F@ctory’s enterprise connectivity solution offers numerous advantages over traditional data collection methods and is built to handle high levels of data processing and interaction.
“As more and more IT systems are used to remain competitive in the manufacturing space, they require increasing amounts of shop floor information. Without e-F@ctory, the sheer volume of data required would overwhelm the control systems and force costly retrofit or clumsy work-around solutions,” said the company in a statement accompanying the launch.
Four main components
e-F@ctory is based on four main components: iQ Automation; iQ Works; the CC-Link network architecture, and the MESIF (manufacturing execution system interface) or eMESIF (enhanced MESIF).
iQ Automation represents the next generation of automation platforms from Mitsubishi Electric, and builds on the foundation of the Q Series Automation Platform, which has more than four million systems installed worldwide.
With iQ Automation, Mitsubishi Electric extends the Q Series’ feature set beyond unifying sequence, motion, process and PC-based control on the same platform by adding CNC and robot control capability. iQ Works is the complementary integrated development environment that can be used to develop and maintain complete systems, regardless of the control disciplines and networks involved.
CC-Link IE (Industrial Ethernet) claims to be the world’s first application of gigabit Ethernet technology to the industrial automation market. With essentially unlimited bandwidth, CC-Link IE permits networks to be set up and operated without needing to write any program code.
Manufacturing execution system interface (MESIF) and enhanced MESIF (eMESIF) technologies offer cost savings by allowing shop floor controllers to communicate directly with enterprise IT level servers, avoiding the need for intermediate PC-based hardware and the associated reliability, cost and maintenance issues.
