Based in Sweden, the Svedala Group has its own sales companies in 50 countries, with annual sales of approximately SEK 15 billion and about 11,000 employees world-wide. Svedala's strategy is to achieve leadership in all areas relating to the supply of complete solutions to the construction, mineral processing and recycling industries.
One of Svedala's better known products is the Optimizing Control System (OCS). OCS is an expert system that optimizes mineral processing circuits, such as grinding and floatation.
With many installations around the globe, OCS supplements conventional DCS or PLC controls and continuously maximize the profitability of plant operation. OCS continuously determines and implements optimized set points that reflect a selected control strategy. It maintains a required product quality and targets a technical and economical objective. This results in an increase in capacity, product quality, value and/or a decrease in production costs.
Dr. Andre Vien, Research Engineer at Svedala Process Technology, based in Kelowna, BC, was the project manager of the OCS implementation at Iron Ore of Canada located in Newfoundland, Canada. "We had to connect 10 copies of OCS, running in parallel, to a Foxboro I/A DCS" said Vien. "Since the existing DDE connection was too slow, we turned to OPC. We found out about Matrikon's OPC servers in general from a prior visit to the company's headquarters in Edmonton, Alberta, and looking at the web site to see if there was one for Foxboro I/A."
"The installation was a cakewalk" said Vien. "Matrikon's OPC server for Foxboro I/A provided us with the stability and data throughput that we needed to properly implement OCS." The combination of OCS and the Matrikon OPC server was so successful, that Vien didn't have to think twice before using it again at PT Freeport in Indonesia and once more in Brazil!
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