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ABB - In business since more than 100 years has more than 160,000
employees collaborating with customers in some 100 countries today.
ABB is a business-to-business supplier - from process, manufacturing
and consumer industries to utilities, the oil, gas and petrochemical
industry, as well as automation and power products, and into financial
services, where ABB Printing
is a part of the automation division.
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Dow Jones & Company, founded in 1882, publishes the
world's most vital business and financial news and information.
The Wall
Street Journal has daily circulation of about 1.8 million and
is the largest newspaper in the U.S. December 1995 happened something
with The Wall Street Journal in the US. The Wall Street Journal
went, what we call putting CMYK into its paper, colored. |
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But what has this to do with RTA?
Well, ABB won 1994 the contract to refurnish all newspaper presses
at Dow Jones on all of the 17 printing sites in the US. Goal was
to add two printing towers on each press to get this job done
and colored leads could run through the presses. The control system
for all printing couples had to be done with a uniform control
console, uniform even the various printing presses were manufactured
from GOSS (US) and TKS (Japan) - in other words from completely
different suppliers. And on top of that there were all the different
printing couples, dampeners, inking-units, compensators, … which
the two printing press manufacturers had used over the years.
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But Dow Jones asked even for more - further production planning
tools were required. The Control Console had to supervise and
control the press according to the product being printed and not
only according to the press configuration. Upon selection of the
desired page, all indications, commands, etc. had to retrieve
and sent data from/to the press elements affecting the particular
page. Another additional pre-requisite was to automate the presetting
of the presses in order to transferring the preset values from
three nationwide scanner locations directly onto the presses via
Dow Jones' internal WAN. And everything had to be based on a standard
technology. SUN workstations running SUN-OS (Unix), a Motif (X11)
windows based user interface, an ORACLE (SQL) relational database
system etc.
This challenge, interesting as it is, called for a flexible development
tool, which allowed fulfilling these, various demands.
ABB choose RTA to develop a new MPS control console (MPS730).
Especially for occasions like this, were everybody needs a helpful
and flexible tool, based on well-known industrial standards, RTA
is the right tool because it allows fast and flexible implementation
of projects with such high demands.
The configuration - the RTA redundancy in a glance, security
pure
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The attention was focused on security, because breakdowns cost
money in newspaper plants - a LOT of money in this case. Two press
consoles control the printing press. Both are redundant RTA-servers,
one as a master to provide all process data over the L.A.N. to
all other RTA-nodes. The second console is configured as stand-by
server, able to take over in a blink (HOT-STANDBY). During normal
operations both consoles can be used to operate the press. RTA
takes care of resource sharing problems in real-time, thus making
sure that two press operators working on the two consoles at the
same time do not give conflicting commands to the press.
The Production Preparation Console, another RTA-client in the
Dow Jones system, provides the RTA-servers with all production
data before the production is started and can be used as a third
console during the printing process as well.
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