SIMATIC Maintenance Station

Description

Consistently high productivity is the competitive requirement par excellence in every production. Production downtimes should be avoided if possible or - if that cannot be accomplished completely - be kept as minor as possible. Frequently, downtimes are also caused by less than optimal maintenance. Here, intelligent maintenance strategies can be employed, whose essential goal is to make the maintenance plannable, as a result of which downtimes are considerably reduced

Benefits

• Visualization of the maintenance information of the entire automation system

• Automatic derivation of the data from the hardware configurations

• Manufacturer-spanning display of service and maintenance data

• Traceability of events and operator actions via automated alarms, which form the basis for later analyses to optimize the plant

• Consistency and homogeneity of data, visualization and operation with the SCADA system and maintenance station

Functionality

Efficient maintenance is possible in connection with the WinCC option package SIMATIC Maintenance Station. Thereby it is irrelevant whether the process visualization and maintenance functionality run on a common computer or on separate devices. Since the same operating and monitoring tools are being employed, the display can be switched between SCADA and maintenance at any time. The advantage is obvious: The operator can - at any time - also obtain an overview of current identification & maintenance (I&M) information, without having to interrupt the process.

Fig. Monitoring of the plant status via automatically generated screens

Generating instead of programming

The maintenance station is configured by selecting the automation systems to be displayed from STEP 7 to create a hardware configuration. With this hardware configuration, the maintenance station recognizes which devices belong to the plant and creates an image for the maintenance in WinCC. The integration of components is based on established standards and is possible for a large number of devices from different manufacturers. The project generates itself automatically in the form of hierarchically structured, already connected WinCC screens - without additional programming work for the user- and then is automatically transferred to the Maintenance Station. New hardware components brought into the hardware configuration of STEP 7 are automatically made available to the maintenance station. A manual updating is not necessary, follow-up costs are avoided.

Corrective/preventive maintenance

In runtime, the maintenance station displays all connected control components, switching units, drives, etc. and monitors the current plant status using uniform symbols. In doing so, the program not just responds to errors once they have occurred (i.e. corrective maintenance), but also to measures entered into the system that are to prevent errors prior to their occurrence (preventive maintenance). Such timedependent or load-dependent measures take place regularly and/or after a certain number of operating cycles, operating hours or load peaks, and can be scheduled in such a way as to optimally utilize the existing resources. The SIMATIC Maintenance Station offers perfect support for performing the maintenance. In doing so, it generates a comprehensive database for the later optimization of the plant and ultimately results in reduced maintenance costs.