ABB is one the world's leading companies in the fields of automation, process control and industrial information technology. To promote its latest products for control of the process for making flat steel, aluminum and copper strip the company has developed an application that allows remote surveillance and error detection using a mobile phone.
ABB's mobile application Appletviewer can be used for remote surveillance and error detection in heavy industry.
ABB has developed a new generation of its Stressometer system, which measures and controls the flatness of metal strip in rolling mills. Lars Jonsson, flatness systems specialist, says that making the solution mobile is a great way of promoting it.
"Making our control system mobile is an excellent way of showing the benefits of the system," he says. "It also shows that it is platform independent and that it is actually possible to use remote surveillance of the system and take action."
Jonsson says that remote solutions are already available in the industry but they are restricted to local area networks and require a palm pilot or laptop computer. ABB's solution for mobile phones, called Appletviewer, was developed in cooperation with Cell Telecom. The application can be downloaded to any Java-enabled mobile phone and can then be used by technicians or managers on the move.
Built on Java
The Stressometer system in the rolling mill is also built on Java and uses a web browser as the interface with the rolling mill operator. The solution is platform independent and can run on any hardware with Java software, such as a PC, Mac or UNIX system.
Appletviewer is a Java application that executes Java applets. These applets are downloaded to mobile phones from the Stressometer system in the same way they are downloaded to the mill operator's web browser. The applet code executed in the phone is identical to the code executed in the browser.
A high degree of accuracy is required in the rolling mill process with machines producing flat metal strip between 0.06 and 10mm. Jonsson says it is critical that the metal strip is absolutely flat. If the strip produced in the rolling mill is not flat then it can cause significant problems in the manufacture of the final products, such as cars, refrigerators and packaging cans. The Stressometer system is designed to help avoid this problem.
Built to promote
"Right now, the biggest benefit with the Appletviewer is to promote our Stressometer solution," Jonsson says. "But many customers have found the solution interesting and view it as a way for managers to have control over the process. They can see the benefits of following the process on the move, either from their phone or a laptop with a PC card. It makes it easy for the managers to keep themselves updated and to help improve things, together with staff at the factory."
Jonsson believes that heavy industry remote surveillance will become more common but, as always, security is important.
"Many customers are, of course, concerned about security issues and as for now we are only running the system on a point-to-point basis over a modem," he says. "Security issues will have to be taken in to consideration when moving into more widespread usage, and some parts of the process might not be suitable for remote surveillance.
"The next step is to make it possible to use the built-in browser on mobile phones instead of using an application. But some issues have to be solved first, such as making the phone browsers compatible with ordinary PC browsers."
