The task of building a 3.9L V-6 engine at a major U.S. carmaker is being made easier as a result of a total Siemens Solution for Powertrain, based upon the Siemens TRANSLINE System Solution and Motion Control Information System (MCIS). This system solution is enabling the production of cylinder-deactivation system engines at one of the largest engine plants in the world. Nearly 500 SINUMERIK 840D CNCs and SIMATIC S7-300 PLCs on the machine tools, transfer lines, robotic buffers, sub-assembly and other equipment are controlled by this total Siemens Powertrain motion control system.

As this plant was being planned in 2003, to become the carmaker's premier agile manufacturing facility, an assessment was made of the various machining and materials handling requirements. As groups of data would be collected, then fed to central connection points, then to the FIS (Factory Information System), it was essential to seek out a powerful machine control that could handle these tasks. Likewise, the control needed to be accessible to various operators, working with a variety of machine tool builders' equipment and other devices.

Following a thorough review of the cutting parameters, as well as the transfer line set-ups, it was determined that approximately 400 machine tools were needed to accomplish the various operations. Central to the process were ten work cells, each containing six EX-CELL-O machining systems and four COMAU machining systems with D¼rr material handling, as well as robotic buffers and other builders' equipment. The machining systems would have independent CNCs onboard, which would transmit data to intermediate cell controllers. These cell controllers would then feed production data to the host server.

The cell controller is essentially a PC, which can monitor up to 80 machines, according to the supplier, Siemens Energy & Automation, who also supplies the predominant individual machine tool CNC chosen for this engine plant, the SINUMERIK 840D. Typically, the status of all machine tool operations, as well as alarm signals, is channeled to an Oracle database, as part of the cell controller to the FIS. The data are utilized for the company's production monitoring and control system, which seeks to compile all parametric functions of machine operations plant wide, for subsequent analysis and process improvement.