IoT-based Production Output Monitoring System for Plastic Packaging Manufacturing Process

Abstract

This paper discusses about the development of an IoT-based production output monitoring system in the production line of Chiga Light Industries Sdn. Bhd. which is a plastic packaging manufacturing company. Although the existing company Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system provides a platform for production manager and officers to monitor as well as collect the length of plastic film produced on a printing machine, only the total amount of finished goods in kilograms (kg) is recorded. However, the total length of plastic produced, and time taken to finish one tubing are needed for machine analysis and production planning. Therefore, a length encoder is used to detect the length of plastic film produced and connected to a counter meter to display the present value of plastic produced as well as the setting value for one roll of plastic. Besides, an Arduino board is used to read data from the counter meter while an ESP8266-01 Wi-Fi module is used to send the data to ThingSpeakTM cloud for storing. ThingSpeakTM analysed and visualised the collected present and setting values of the counter meter on a private channel. The duration for uploading a data is set to one hour. From the developed monitoring system, production manager and officers could monitor machine performance, operators working performance and collect the length of plastic produced on a printing machine. Besides, the total length of plastic in a roll could also be detected to ensure customer requirement is achieved.