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Use case · Production

Machine state tracking

Turn the running, blocked and fault signals of a machine into states, measure how long each state lasts, and see where the time went per line and shift.

Try it with the quickstartAll use cases
Dashboard with a gauge, a flow-rate chart and a machine status light
Apache StreamPipes, demo data

The situation

Most controllers already expose a handful of bits that say whether the machine is running, blocked, starved or in fault. What is missing is the bookkeeping: how long was the machine in each state, how often did it stop, and which stops cost the most time.

Clipboards and spreadsheets fill the gap in many plants. A pipeline in StreamPipes does the same job continuously, with the results stored as datasets that charts and dashboards can use right away.

How it works in StreamPipes

  1. 1

    Read the signals

    Create a Siemens S7, Modbus or OPC UA adapter and pick the running, blocked and fault addresses. The event preview shows the raw bits so you can check them against the machine.

  2. 2

    Turn bits into states

    The Boolean To State processor maps the boolean fields to a readable state such as running, blocked or fault, with a default state when none of them is set.

  3. 3

    Measure durations and counts

    Task Duration measures how long each state lasted. Boolean Timer and Boolean Counter track a single signal, for example how long and how often the fault bit was set.

  4. 4

    Review per line and shift

    Store the state changes and durations as datasets. A status heatmap shows the day at a glance, a dashboard per line gives supervisors the stop times without a spreadsheet, and a mail goes out when a stop runs long.

What it looks like

Pipeline turning machine signals into states, durations, a dataset and a downtime email
States, durations, storage and a downtime mail in one pipeline.
Configuration of the Boolean To State processor
Map boolean signals to named machine states.
Status heatmap chart
States over time: running, blocked and fault periods per machine.

Try it on your machine.

One command starts StreamPipes with Docker. The quickstart takes you from there to a first dashboard.

Open the quickstartAll downloads
docker composerelease 0.98.0
mkdir -p streampipes-0.98.0 && cd streampipes-0.98.0 \
  && curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/streampipes/0.98.0/installer/compose/docker-compose.yml \
  && curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/streampipes/0.98.0/installer/compose/.env \
  && docker compose up -d