Project overview

The Royal FloraHolland cooperative has been operating one of the largest electric monorail systems in the world in Aalsmeer (Netherlands) for more than 20 years. From here, flowers and plants are sent all over the world.

Every hour, around 2,600 individual stacking cars whiz through the plant. In total, the vehicles cover around 39,000 kilometers a day, i.e. travel around the world once every day. To ensure that the supply of spare parts with hardware components and the update and support services for the software systems continue to function smoothly in the future, Berghof Automation has developed a comprehensive modernization concept together with the operating company Pentanova CS Nederland BV and in close coordination with the owner Royal FloraHolland.

In this largest retrofit project in Berghof’s history to date, we are gradually replacing the nearly 1,800 CODESYS V2.1 PLCs in use at the plant with modern CODESYS V3.5 controllers.

Challenges

For all retrofit projects, the top priority at Berghof Automation is: the plant must always remain operational.

That’s why here, too, we carried out and continue to carry out all work requiring the complete shutdown of the plant either at night or at weekends. Extensive planning and precise coordination also ensure that all work goes smoothly and without any loss of productivity. In addition, we always build a fallback strategy into our planning to ensure the safe operation of the plant even in the event of unforeseen events (see also chapter “The Berghof solution in detail”).

A particular challenge in this project is the enormous transport capacity of the plant: even during the modernization, up to 2,600 stacking cars per hour should be possible at any time.

To ensure that the project also fits in optimally with Royal FloraHolland’s ideas from an economic point of view, we have also divided the retrofit project into individual stages (see also chapter “Phases of the retrofit project”).

In addition, there is another special feature with regard to the control of the individual EMS vehicles: Up to 6 vehicles can cover large sections of the 17,5 km long rail route in formation with minimum spacing. All the vehicles in a convoy travel absolutely synchronously - and at speeds of up to 180 m/min. For this reason, the new control systems in the vehicles have to ensure exactly the same driving characteristics as the previous control systems. This is because even minimal differences in the braking and acceleration phases could affect the complex control functions in the train set.