Ignition Delivers Process Control & Real-Time Visibility For Global Leader In Aquaculture Feed

Project Overview

A global leader in aquaculture feed aimed to establish its largest shrimp feed production facility worldwide in Guayaquil, Ecuador. To support these growing demands, the aquaculture company needed a modern, centralized system to ensure reliability, efficiency, and full operational visibility for its two major facilities. ASE Global delivered a scalable Ignition-based solution that unified production management, control, and monitoring, creating a standard platform designed to meet current requirements and expand across future local and international sites.

Challenges

The Galapagos project implemented process control and manufacturing systems across two large facilities. Galapagos 1 includes six production lines with numerous pieces of equipment for dosing, grinding, extruding, coating, and packaging processes. Galapagos 2 has a comparable number of production lines and systems to Galapagos 1; both share intake process and storage areas. 

The solution needed to be robust, using modern technology to handle many simultaneous connections without performance issues, and establish a standardized, reproducible architecture for local and international deployment. The system had to comply with ISA-95, ISA-88, ISA-101, and ISA-104 standards, enabling real-time production order processing, material consumptions, inline semifinished and finished product tracking, to accomplish a 160 tons/hour production rate and reliable operational data.

The system required high cybersecurity and easy accessibility, considering its 40+ industrial Panel PCs, standardized HMIs, and 50+ workstations/web clients. Also, Ignition needed to integrate with OEM systems like Geelen (dryer systems), Extrutech (extruders), Jesma (dynamic weighting), and Payper (packaging systems), and with the aquaculture company’s ERP (Infor M3) through their proprietary corporate middleware.

Beyond production, the system required an ISO 50001-compliant energy management system, and real-time data integration with corporate OEE and downtime systems to identify and address inefficiencies, promote sustainability, and provide joint operational visibility across the organization.

One major challenge was the large size of the manufacturing plants with over 600,000 I/O signals for motors, sensors, and actuators. Another significant challenge was managing, executing, and monitoring multiple production orders simultaneously for all lines and work centers. The system had to be fast enough to achieve nominal production capacity, but at the same time, it had to be highly accurate to ensure product quality and optimize production costs. 

Given the single storage area shared by both plants, refill silo and “move material” orders had to be well-planned and synchronized to ensure adequate supply to both plants and avoid downtime due to raw material shortages. Additionally, it was crucial to continuously monitor production bins inventory to meet the demands of 24/7 operations.

The presence of several third-party OEM systems posed another challenge. The solution needed to integrate with several interfaces, drivers, and protocols to enable connections with external APIs from equipment providers. 

One of the most important business issues was to make sure all transaction data and material consumption reports were 100% reliable and recorded in the correct cost center accounts within the ERP system for financial accuracy as well as traceability throughout the entire operation.

In addition, the system required an alarm notification system integrated with the company's Microsoft environment, such as Power Apps and Microsoft Teams, to facilitate timely and concise notifications to responsible staff via standardized communication channels.

Solution

To accomplish the project requirements, ASE Global implemented an Ignition-based hub & spoke architecture with each facility featuring a scale-out distribution utilizing the concept of a load balance I/O and frontend services to optimize user interface performance. 

The frontend employed HTML5 and CSS3 for web-native, intuitive, and high-performance user interaction. Ignition distributes data processing among servers to enhance responsiveness as well as availability under high loads. User Defined Types (UDTs) facilitated standardization for plant equipment and control objects across both facilities to support seamless deployment. ASE used Perspective to create a dynamic, mobile-responsive application for a large number of panel PCs and centralized control rooms, all with simplified HMI management.

Ignition's flexibility enabled OPC UA, Web Services, AB drivers, Siemens drivers, and database-based APIs to integrate with all third-party OEM systems. ASE Global developed a scripting interface using Ignition tools to integrate with the aquaculture company’s corporate middleware and high-performance database connections for real-time and history production data. Moreover, ASE used the REST API protocol to integrate alarm notification with the Microsoft environment. 

The Batch Management system handled production order creation, scheduling, and real-time material consumption along with semi-finished and finished product tracking. All of this was accomplished with backend logic in Ignition using customized Python and SQL scripting that ASE Global developed from scratch. The system included screens for operational tasks like production order queues, batch run tracking, and inventory management. 

ASE Global customized batch execution screens based on corporate standards through Sepasoft's Batch Procedure Module. Each production line was synchronized with phase control, modular control units, and equipment integration based on ISA-95 and ISA-88 standards.

ASE Global developed an energy monitoring system, integrating electricity meters, water meters, and steam meters. Energy dashboards and reports match production orders and batch information, providing real-time deviations and efficiency KPIs. 

Result

With this Ignition system, both Galapagos plants have a standardized process control system, providing integral operation processes from intake to packaging. The solution has allowed the aquaculture company to:

• Continuously update inventory and real-time material consumption reports.
• Enhance control and monitoring using the new Batch Management system.
• Gain real-time energy consumption insights to enable timely detection of anomalies and inefficiencies, resulting in less waste and proper resource utilization.
• Obtain production targets and achieve the plant's intended capacity of 160 tons/hour.
• Generate real-time inline reports, such as energy used per batch, providing supervisors with real-time opportunities for optimizing operations.
• Establish the foundation for future integrations and local or international implementations.
• Implement a critical alarm and event notification solution with Microsoft applications such as Teams and Power Automate.
• Improve decision-making during the current production shift.

This phase of the Ignition implementation has set the groundwork for further development with aims to implement the same model in two more locations in Latin America in the following rollout. Subsequent phases will also focus on predictive maintenance and analytics using the batch and energy data currently being collected. There is also interest in further integration through a Unified Namespace (UNS) architecture model with MQTT. This approach would allow real-time, enterprise-wide visibility across global operations, ensuring seamless information flow from plant floor to corporate analytics systems and further enhancing operational and energy efficiency.

Project Team

The project was executed by ASE's principal team, comprising:​

• Esteban De la Torre: Project Leader, responsible for architecture design and overall coordination
• Jonathan Espín Martin: Architecture & Application Design
• Alex Padilla: Technical Leader, responsible for interfaces and Batch Management
• Ramiro Cepeda: Technical Leader, responsible for PLC, SCADA and Commissioner
• Hugo Cisneros: Frontend Developer 
• Xavier Medina: Backend Developer
• Alfonso Asitimbay: Batch Procedure Developer
• Alan Ojeda: Infrastructure Engineer and Databases, in charge of server’s configuration

The overall team also includes more members, such as PLC and Ignition developers.

Start Date: March 2023

Deploy Date: February 2025