TestLink : Software for connecting laboratory equipment and automation of workflow.

Abstract: Software development is of great significance in manufacturing and process industry. Software can, for example, make production more efficient and monitoring easier. In paperboard industry testing the product, that is, paperboard, is important. Testing is done to make sure that the product meets the requirements of the customers who transform the paperboard to packaging products. In the Skoghall paperboard Mill operators make use of a range of different test methods. Since the work pace is high and the product is being continuously tested improvements of the workflow at the laboratory are always of interest.   The aim of this project is to develop a program that connects test instruments at Skoghall Mill’s test laboratory to the Mill’s network. The motivation is to automate part of the work process by removing the step of manually reading measurement values from the test instruments. The scope of this project includes developing software that connects one of the instruments (the Short Span Compression tester [1] or SCT) at the laboratory to the Mill’s network. This program, named TestLink, will work as a proof of concept for connecting instruments using a common interface. The software is constructed using a modular approach forming a platform where an additional instrument can be connected by creating a new module. The software is developed in Visual Studio using C# as the programming language. The software architecture follows the MVVM [2] (Model View ViewModel) design pattern paradigm and WPF [3] (Windows Presentation Foundation) is used to construct the graphical user interface. The result shows that time savings can be made when automating part of the work with the introduction of new software.