LABTECH Dairy Monitoring Software                    

OEM Software Application Development
 

LABTECH and ControLink LLC of West Chester, Ohio have worked together to create an OEM version of LABTECH software for Dairy Monitoring. A user interface screen for this is shown below.

Background

Today, many manufacturers and food producers are making use of data acquisition and control systems for quality, safety, and security purposes. In all industries, customer demands for product quality are constantly increasing, and are part of the competitive landscape. This is especially true in the food industry. There, in addition to consumer desires for quality, government regulators are instituting required quality programs, and are increasingly concerned about product security as well. The dairy industry has always had stringent regulations to assure consumer health, and these are increasing.

To meet the needs of the dairy industry, ControLink developed wireless temperature sensors that are designed for dairy farms. These wireless sensors provide ease of installation and use that are a real advance over wired sensors. ControLink came to LABTECH for an OEM software package that was tailored to a very specific dairy monitoring application. The results of this have been excellent. A powerful and yet very easy to use software package has resulted, which meets and exceeds the requirements. A key LABTECH advantage is that it can leverage software components from its LABTECH NOTEBOOK and LABTECH CONTROL products. These provided a RAD (Rapid Application Development) capability, which shortened the development time to meet ControlLink’s narrow time-to-market window.
 
 

Common Quality Application Requirements

The resulting software has a lot in common with other quality applications, such as:

• Continuous recording and archiving of raw data.
• Real-time data reduction of the raw data to extract the useful information that the application requires.
• User-friendly interactive graphical screens, so that workers can quickly view the state of the process.
• Alarm generation, to notify personnel of conditions that may require corrective action.
• Alarm acknowledgement by operators for tracking, and archiving of alarm history.

 These common requirements take very different forms for different applications.
 
 

Dairy Monitoring

Raw Data. Milk temperature is a key control point in a dairy farm. Warm milk from cows must be cooled quickly, and both the temperature and allowed cooling time are subject to regulation. After this is achieved, the milk temperature must be kept continuously low. In addition, when the milking apparatus and milk storage tanks are cleaned, the cleaning temperatures and times must be higher than regulated limits. In most dairy farms in North America today, these requirements are only spot checked by inspectors every few months. The ControLink / LABTECH system replaces this with continuous 24x7 monitoring and recording of the relevant temperatures. Two temperature sensors are sufficient for this task. These temperatures are continuously monitored and recorded to disk. The data is shown graphically, and each data point can be viewed numerically in a pop-up window at any time.
 
 

Alarm Detection. In cooperation the dairy industry, alarm detection algorithms were developed. The software continually scans the raw data for alarm conditions in real time, as the data is continuously gathered. If alarms occur, they are shown on the operator console – see the four alarms shown in red text below.
 

This screen shows the measured temperatures in large meters for easy viewing across the milking parlor. The red circle alarm indicator blinks, so it’s very obvious when alarms occur. It keeps blinking until the alarms are acknowledged by the on-screen button. To investigate any alarm, the dairy operator or milk inspector can "drill down" two levels to see more detail on the alarms.
 
 

Alarm Viewer

The "View Alarm Data" button brings up a pop-up window with the times, temperatures, and conditions for all alarms, as shown below.

(Note that the screens shown below are time-accelerated – actual dairy data would have greater time intervals between data points and alarms.)
 
 

Numeric Data Viewer

The next level of drill-down is provided by another button, which provides each measured data point. It would be very difficult to scan through the raw data to find the data corresponding to an alarm. This is avoided by annotating the raw data with each alarm. A button, as shown below provides automatic search through the raw data to find the alarms.

Implementation Details

The initial prototype of the application was constructed in a few days, using LABTECH CONTROL. As the requirements of the application for drill-down on data went outside the capabilities of LABTECH CONTROL, the final implementation used VB (Visual Basic) for the data acquisition, alarm detection, data logging, and drill-down, with LABTECH’s HMI component, LABTECH Realtime VISION, used for the graphical interface. This combination of a standard "shrink-wrapped" package with a small amount of VB code proved to be very efficient.
 
 

Summary

Working together with the dairy industry, ControLink and LABTECH are providing the dairy industry and milk consumers with an unprecedented degree of continuous monitoring. This yields much tighter quality assurance, providing a reliable supply of safer and healthier milk. All this is extremely easy to install and use, and can be provided at very reasonable cost, due to the use of state-of-the-art sensor and software technology.