From Reactive to Proactive: Applying Data Analysis and Automation to Mitigate PLC Communication Disruption

PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) are critical devices in manufacturing, enabling the functioning of machinery and the transmission of build data to other systems in a production facility. Thus, maintaining uptime of these devices is crucial for ensuring that a facility can keep its line running, as even a few minutes of downtime can cost a company thousands in lost units and revenue. One particular pain point that causes downtime is broken communication between the devices and downstream applications, especially those that track orders and traceability. While advances in computing and digital technology have enabled the quick detection of lost signalling and the quick restoration of communication channels, there is much work left to be done in this realm. Besides causing downtime, an incident disrupts the flow of the line, leading to much effort in order to restore normalcy of production, even after resolution of the incident. In addition, the outage and the post-incident recovery can require extensive IT and Controls manpower, especially at undesirable times of the day. Overall, restoration of communication has been a reactive procedure, where most effort so far has been spent minimizing impact instead of eliminating it. This paper investigates how the issue can be approached from predictive and proactive approaches, where data analysis can be leveraged to foresee issues before they occur (and which were previously detected when the incident was already occurring), and automation can be leveraged to execute the preventative measures to avoid line impact. While this paper investigates a particular example based on the author’s experiences with the automotive industry and deploying automation (especially with Red Hat Ansible and automation playbooks) the applicability of the concepts to other industries and similar problems is also discussed.