HARDWARIO Helps Prevent Production Downtime at the TPCA Carmaker

TPCA is a joint venture between two global carmakers: Japan’s Toyota Motor Corporation and France’s Groupe PSA. At its plant in Ovčáry near Kolín it produces Toyota, Peugeot, and Citroën passenger cars in high volumes - in 2017 it passed a major milestone of 3 million cars built.

A plant of this scale needs to run at peak performance. To deliver high-quality cars as efficiently as possible, the carmaker constantly looks for innovative ways to eliminate and prevent faults. That is why TPCA asked us to help find an affordable, effective way to anticipate problems on the production line.

The Challenge

One of the machines involved in vehicle assembly is the fitting line in the carmaker’s assembly department. A breakdown here - for example a motor failure - disrupts the entire assembly process and causes enormous losses.

TPCA knew that one possible cause of an outage is an overheating fitting-line motor, a situation that can be prevented by monitoring temperature and reporting elevated readings in time. The carmaker chose motor-temperature measurement for problem prediction as its pilot IoT project.

The requirements were demanding:

• The sensor had to wirelessly monitor temperature in a harsh industrial environment
• The device had to connect to TPCA’s local IT communication infrastructure
• The sensor had to send data at very short intervals
• The device had to run on low power
• Everything had to be simple to install and maintain, and very low cost
• Installation had to happen within a short, planned line shutdown

The Solution

Based on an analysis of the requirements, we built the solution on our modular IoT kit. This met the demands for a low-cost device and customized communication: the kit makes it easy to build wireless IoT devices and freely adjust their behavior, and it integrates readily with different platforms and IT systems.

For the TPCA pilot we used:

• The IoT kit with a customized radio protocol in the 868 MHz band
• External temperature sensors connected to a dedicated module
• A Raspberry Pi system with a radio dongle, acting as the communication gateway

For the pilot we prepared three temperature sensors, which TPCA technicians attached non-invasively to the motor housings on the line. The sensors wirelessly send the measured temperature at very short intervals to the Raspberry Pi and on to the carmaker’s IT system. They are powered by ordinary alkaline batteries.

How It Works

The gateway - the Raspberry Pi with its radio dongle - receives data from the sensors and forwards it over the LAN to a Grafana application for further processing and visualization.

A notification service then comes into play: if a configured temperature threshold is exceeded, it sends a warning e-mail to maintenance. Technicians inspect the motor and propose measures to prevent a failure and an unplanned line stoppage.

Developing the entire solution, including the radio-protocol customization, took just two weeks. Thanks to rapid development and quick installation, we delivered the solution at very low cost while meeting TPCA’s high standards for quality and reliability.

Results

Through this collaboration, TPCA confirmed that implementing IoT into predictive maintenance makes sense - even when the whole solution is built on a lightweight IoT kit. Already during the pilot, timely alerts to maintenance prevented a line stoppage and saved several hundred thousand crowns. TPCA considers the greatest benefits of the project to be the very short implementation time and the extremely low cost, which did not exceed 500 EUR.

“With the modules, we were able to set up our own little piece of Industry 4.0 in just a few days. And it saved us both time and money.”

Marek Herda, IT Specialist for Industry 4.0 and security projects, TPCA