The present invention relates to a method of process control of a process control system, and more particularly, to a method of generating a recipe which will be utilized by the process control system wherein the process control system includes a plurality of production lines of varying configurations, a recipe being automatically generated for each production line to match the equipment configuration of the production line.
In existing systems, the configuration of the production line is inputted by the production supervisor (i.e., user) and the desired process (formula) is also inputted to a microprocessor, the microprocessor generating the recipe to be utilized by the production line to generate the product (of the formula). In these existing systems, the recipe includes dependencies on an equipment class such that the recipe generated is specific to that class of production line. The generated recipe contains all the information for the control software to run the class production line. A recipe is also generated for each production line. In the existing systems, there is a recipe for each product and each class of production line. Thus, for example, a system having four (4) formulas (i.e., 4 products which are manufactured) and five (5) production lines, there are twenty (20) recipes which must be generated and maintained. Thus, any changes in the formula or the equipment requires the recipe to be regenerated. Any change to the formula requires the recipe for each equipment (i.e., production line) to be reexecuted, and any change to the equipment requires all recipes for that equipment to be regenerated.
Thus there exists a need to simplify the recipe generation and maintenance process. The present invention achieves the desired simplification by essentially separating the equipment information from the formula i.e., the equipment information, the operations information, and raw materials information are each stored in a separate equipment data base, operations data base, and a raw materials data base, respectively. The present invention maintains the formula and data bases as separate entities. The formula for generating the product is completely independent of equipment. The "recipe builder" of the present invention automatically generates a recipe from the formula which includes equipment information. The equipment data base is specific to a production line and doesn't change (unless the equipment is changed). Any change to the formula (which may change for a variety of reasons such as varying texture, quality, . . . of the output product) require a reexecution of recipe builder process which is done at run time in order to get the new recipe but the simplification is achieved by the separation of the equipment information from the formula and does not require the user to input all the information as is required by the existing systems. Thus, in the present invention, any changes to the formula only requires editing the formula, and any changes to the equipment only requires modifying the equipment data base.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds