Photo: pixabay [Digital Bizon, reporter Kim Maeng-geun] Because rapid economic growth worldwide keeps pushing energy costs upward, research is needed on how to save energy by managing it efficiently. As one way to provide the information needed to manage energy consumption efficiently, the development and operation of an IoT (Internet of Things)-based real-time energy monitoring and analysis system has been proposed. In addition, building on such a monitoring system, tools have been developed for energy analysis and decision support in manufacturing processes.
Technologies for building industrial IoT platforms are broadly classified into technologies for collecting raw data on an IoT basis, technologies for processing and analyzing the collected data, and technologies for connecting to existing applications such as ERP/MES (Enterprise Resource Program/Manufacturing Execution System) and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) facilities.
For smart factory implementation, adoption of industrial IoT solutions is growing — from the PlantPulse Platform by KOPENS (Korea Open Solution), Hancom MDS's ThingsSPIN, and SynPlan APS, the IoT-based smart factory production planning solution from Jisik System Co., Ltd., to, more recently, cloud-based IoT platforms such as KETI's Mobius, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft's Azure.
IoT-Based Platform Service Architecture
In the IoT field, testbeds and pilot projects are underway to activate systems in which all devices, people, and things are connected over networks and share information with one another. To activate IoT-based services and solve the problems of time spent on infrastructure construction and duplicate investment, solutions built on a commonly shared platform are being established.
Meanwhile, since each industry must implement diverse forms and functions, a need has been identified for platforms that provide IoT services tailored to similar industries along with services that can be customized.
On the energy-saving front, as global energy use continues to grow, research is underway on building energy usage management systems that combine IT technology to reduce energy consumption. Related research areas include the convergence of IoT and ICT, smart grids, microgrids, energy storage systems, and energy information systems.
An IoT-based platform service refers to an environment that receives data from sensors in real time and provides users not only with real-time data services but also with time-series statistics and data correlation information.
Real-Time Monitoring and Analysis System Architecture
To develop applications using the data collected in real time on the IoT platform server and SCADA server, the data is transmitted to the data collection server via push requests using the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) API method. The monitoring server consists of a data collection server that gathers real-time data and an application server that manages the collected data. Real-time data is pushed to users through sockets and stored in a MongoDB database.
When a client requests the monitoring service, equipment status information and detailed equipment information are fetched from the ERP/MES database to the application server as needed and provided to the client. Real-time values continue to arrive over sockets from the IoT server and SCADA server, providing users with information on energy usage, costs, and more.
In conclusion, the architecture has the advantage of increasing retrieval speed by operating a collection server capable of gathering data from various types of sources separately from an application server that serves the data.
Going forward, research is needed to improve the proposed base system into one that helps save energy, by using energy usage patterns and unit-consumption analysis information to develop machine-learning-based energy consumption forecasting algorithms and to optimize process operations for each piece of equipment.
Source: Digital Bizon (http://www.digitalbizon.com)
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