Nissan's production line at Sunderland
(one of 'our' computers is located behind the rectangular orange boxes in centre right)

Nissan Motor Manufacturing (UK) Ltd. is the UK arm of a well-known Japanese car manufacturer. Vehicles currently produced in the Sunderland plant include the Micra, Almera and Primera.

Industrial Vision Systems (IVS) is the UK division of a German company specialising in capturing and analysing images, primarily for manufacturing industries.

The captured data is to be stored in a local SQL Server database and periodically uploaded to a central SQL database which will hold the consolidated data from all the production lines.

When the vehicle reaches the end of the production line a barcode on a card  contained in the vehicle is scanned and the associated photograph and data are to be recovered and displayed on the screen. This is to ensure that the vehicle details (model, colour, options, etc.) correctly matches up with the VIN.

Additional requirements include the need to send an e-mail automatically when certain conditions occur (such as a VIN not matching or one of the operating parameters being changed), the need to delete old records out of the system and the requirement to run Hand's Off so that manual intervention is not required during regular operation.

This was an interesting application and somewhat different to our regular database applications. For this project we worked closely with Industrial Vision (who were supplying the photographic side of the solution) and Optimum Control Solutions (who were programming the various controllers) to come up with a robust, integrated, solution.

The main complications were in interfacing to and automating the third party controls (Neurocheck and Sysymac/Fins Gateway) which, although they had some sample VB code, did not cover what we were trying to do. As these were specialist systems there were also no books, newsgroups, etc. to go to for support (still, we managed it okay in the end!).

Visual Basic 6 was chosen for the client development system as the existing components were designed to interface with VB and had VB6 examples (otherwise we would probably have used VB.NET). The client software was designed using object oriented principles (eg the use of Class modules for each of the main components) and included software to capture and display the images as well as to store it in SQL Server. Two applications were developed; a data capture application and a data retrieval application. As each production line was subtly different (for example different address locations for the various controllers and different database connections) a text file containing this configuration information was stored on each client computer and was read when the application started up.

SQL Server 2000 was used as the database engine (Desktop Edition for the production line computers, Standard Edition for the central server). Linked Server technology was used to pass data from the client's SQL Server databases to the central SQL Server database (DTS is problematic due to the use of the image data type used to store the photographs). Various stored procedures and jobs were created to run at regular intervals to transfer data between the servers, delete old data, check for and send e-mails. Stored Procedures were also used to interface with the client VB application.

One big issue with the system was reliability; as our application had the power to shut the production lines down! Consequently we had to be very certain that there were no bugs in the system and that it could run continuously for month after month with no manual intervention.

The solution was implemented in June 2003 and has been running continuously ever since.