Aston Dane Plc - Cadbury Trebor Bassett Article

Cadbury Trebor Bassett Date May 2002

	�	Management Information System for Marlbrook analyses and reports a range of Key Performance Indicators	�
The Cadbury Trebor Bassett factory at Marlbrook is the main chocolate crumb production facility in the UK. Located in Hertfordshire's rich agricultural heartland, the factory has been producing crumb, the main feedstock for Cadbury's famous Dairy Milk chocolate for over 25 years. The process involves the evaporation of millions of litres of milk in combination with cocoa liquor and sugar in a unique process which lies at the heart of the Cadbury's chocolate distinctive flavour, so recognisable to "chocoholics" young and old the world over. Aston Dane plc were invited by Cadbury's to provide a new Management Information System, the first of its kind in the Cadbury Trebor Bassett group of companies, to help analyse a range of Key plant Performance Indicators (KPI's). The system gathers data from a range of 40 PLC's which control and monitor the production process across the entire site complex, including power consumption and effluent plants. The data is served up to a high speed high compression "process historian" which provides the process development engineers a range of capabilities including:
Fixed reports & Ad-Hoc queries. Daily summaries of production quality. Performance monitoring based on key events.
A further objective was the enhancement of the management information service to encompass automation of reporting and easier access for management to performance and quality data. The first stage of the project was the analysis of the plant so as to create a consistent data model on which the historian database could be structured along the lines of the S88 equipment model. An important consideration of the implementation was the need to minimise the impact of the historian logger on the existing PLC network traffic as this DH+ network was running at near maximum capacity. The architecture adopted was based heavily on the use of OPC standard compliant software components. The collection of data via the redundant OPC data servers which also supplied the SCADA system ensured reliable data collection at minimum additional overhead.
The diagram in Figure 1 illustrates the system architecture. The historian server was the only additional equipment required and only the addition of certain software ActiveX components was required on the existing client PC's. The Historian server support automatic failover between the two data servers via the OPC redundancy broker ensuring no loss of data should either of the servers fail and logging is independent of the operation of the SCADA software.		Figure 1

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