Thorem: article-based alarming for custom PVC pipes

Thorem runs production lines, each a chain of machines that work together to extrude a PVC pipe. The machines in a line were not linked to each other, and only a few had alarms on the signals that matter, things like temperature, pressure, vacuum and feed level. Spotting drift on those signals leaned heavily on operator expertise and on whatever was visible at each individual machine, since there was no system-wide view of how a line was actually running.

On top of that, Thorem does not make one pipe, they make a lot of them. Diameters, lengths, colours and material recipes all vary from one order to the next, and the right temperature, pressure and vacuum for one article are not the right values for another. A single static set of thresholds was never going to work.

We built an alarm system that watches the signals that actually tell you whether a line is healthy, and rolled it out on a few of their extrusion lines together with the central feed line that supplies them. It pulls analog values like temperature, pressure and vacuum and checks them against low and high thresholds. It reads digital signals such as feed empty, so operators are notified immediately when a hopper runs empty. And for the machines that already had a local alarm lamp, we wired that lamp into the system too, so an alarm on the machine becomes an alarm in the system.

The key piece is that the thresholds are not fixed. Every pipe that Thorem produces is an article with its own parameter ranges. When a line starts on a new article, the system loads the thresholds that belong to that article and uses those to evaluate the signals. Same machines, same signals, different limits, and it happens automatically instead of being a sticker on a panel or something an operator has to remember.

Deviations get caught early, when there is still time to act. Operators see one clear picture of what is alarming on which line, regardless of which machine the signal came from. And because the system is article driven, Thorem can keep adding new pipes to their range without having to rebuild the alarming each time. The thresholds live with the article and can be tuned per line.