Hoerbiger-Origa keeps Paris puffing
April 1st 2005

With more than 100 tons of cigarettes smoked in Paris every day, the city is served by Europe’s largest tobacco products distribution centre.

Orders from wholesalers, shops, restaurants and kiosks are handled at breakneck speed, yet accuracy is never compromised.

Pneumatic components by Hoerbiger-Origa have been used extensively on a new order preparation line, which is 80 metres long and has 60 unloading stations.

Engineers from Hoerbiger- Origa, integration specialists and the site engineers ensured its control system is fully integrated with the site’s IT system: Individual customers can place their orders on-line and the central computer will within seconds generate a packing instruction and send it to the packing line.

The handling system is controlled via ASI bus and sorts cigarette cartons of differing brands, depending on the order, into boxes and then onto pallets. Between one and five cartons of each brand are “shot” onto a fast moving conveyor belt and then automatically put into packaging position and packed in accordance with customer specification or optimised by volume into boxes. The complete loading time lasts only 0.3 seconds per loading operation.

With fast response paramount and reliability taken for granted, the design and development team decided on an architecture using four independent but integrated packaging lines.

This allows a high throughput and gives virtually bombproof redundancy, should a line go