Great team work at third Plugfest in Austria

Joining hands to work on the EUROMAP 77 Companion Specification was the main objective for the Third Plugfest, which took place at ENGEL’s company site in Schwertberg, Austria, on the 24th and 25th of October 2018. Altogether 18 industry drivers of industry 4.0 innovation for the injection molding industry got together for the Third Plugfest. Under the leadership of Dr. Harald Weber (VDMA expert based in Frankfurt/Main, Germany) the participants jointly followed through with a demanding range of testing tasks while sharing insights and helping each other – demonstrating great team spirit all along.

Breathing even more life into the EUROMAP 77 specification in order to further improve its practical applicability was the aim of the participants. This meant spending many hours on interface testing. Tests were carried out diligently – most notably by the injection molding manufacturers but also by IT and software companies who provide server and client solutions for the injection molding industry; among them inray with the EUROMAP 77 Plug-in for the OPC Router. The host, ENGEL AUSTRIA GmbH, who offers a broad diversification of plastics machinery, made sure that time spent recuperating from intensive testing sessions were spent in a nice atmosphere. Overall, many specific tests were carried out successfully, while new concepts could be moved in the right direction to ideally even facilitate connectivity for injection molding machines that might otherwise not be easily connected to an industry 4.0 production environment.

Obviously, a complex specification like EUROMAP 77 cannot be viewed as a plug and play solution in its common meaning of the term – but does share one character trait: Ease of implementation in the industrial programming context. One can actually establish connectivity to MES/ERP as fast as never before. The reason is obvious: The developers of the EUROMAP 77 specification have done all the necessary groundwork to provide the best possible basis for fast and painless connectivity of unlike (i.e. heterogene) systems. Instead of having to invest in several weeks of programming work, the only thing left to do is fine-tuning connection settings to ensure data transfers to higher-level systems (i.e. superordinate systems) will be successful. This was a major innovative step, which the Third Plugfest built upon by working on diverse details of the data protocol, which aims at providing even more scope and freedom to act for all kinds of anticipated and truly important application scenarios.

Bo Biene and Tobias Schultz, EUROMAP 77 plug-in developers at inray, also participated in the event. “It was a successful work-intensive time together that made us a little smarter as we made progress together, because working together speeds up progress while we also arrive at better results together”, reported Tobias Schultz. Bo Biene, (Head of Softwaredevelopment), added, “It was a worthwhile time together, and I am grateful to all participants for their contribution. It was a truly great plugfest, and we’re glad to meet again and join efforts for common goals.”

The list of participants clearly highlights that major manufacturers jointly lead the quest for Industry 4.0 innovation in their industrial sector:

ARBURG
B&R
Beckhoff
Bfa solutions
BMS
ENGEL
FANUC
HB-Therm
ICE flex
Inray
KraussMaffei
Piovan
SIEMENS
Sigmatek
Stöckeler Software Services
Sumitomo (SHI) Demag
TIG
Wittmann Battenfeld + Wittmann Kunststoffgeräte

Additional related information:

Information about our diverse scope of plug-ins can be found here: OPC Router – Plug-ins

Free download link: OPC Router