Your submission was sent successfully! Close

You have successfully unsubscribed! Close

Thank you for signing up for our newsletter!
In these regular emails you will find the latest updates about Ubuntu and upcoming events where you can meet our team.Close

Industrial IoT: manage and control remote assets

Guest

on 17 April 2017

This article was last updated 4 years ago.


This is a guest post by Florian Hoenigschmid, Director of azeti. If you would like to contribute a guest post, please contact ubuntu-devices@canonical.com

When you make a phone call, watch TV or wash your hands, you probably won’t associate this with terms like predictive maintenance, equipment damage, downtime or Service Level Agreements initially.

However, those things are helping to provide services such as mobile connectivity, a stable power grid or clean water. IoT gateways running asset management applications, connected to sensors and machinery are part of a remote asset management system, which monitors and controls critical infrastructure like generators, compressors or HVAC systems in remote locations such as cell towers, water pumping stations or secondary substations. These systems provide operators with insights about the performance of their assets in remote locations. This helps to determine if an asset is about to stop working and therefore require maintenance (preventive maintenance), if equipment has been stolen/destroyed or if operations could be improved and organized in a more cost effective way. The installed remote asset management systems help to minimize downtime, which in turn means a higher quality of the service provided.

Full Stack – Ubuntu and azeti
azeti’s solution is the full stack for managing industrial environments consisting of intelligent software for the edge (azeti Site Controller) running on IoT gateways plus a central server (azeti Engine) application providing visualization, management and deployment capabilities.

Ubuntu Core is the solid fundament for the IoT application and eliminates worries about OS upgrades, security updates and general OS management for thousands of devices. Its broad gateway support helps to choose the right hardware depending on customer’s requirement without a hardware vendor lock-in.

Edge Intelligence for Harsh Environments
azeti’s Site Controller is comparable to a virtual PLC (programmable logic controller) and provides interfaces for all prominent sensor protocols plus sophisticated analytics and automation. This local intelligence enables independence from the network uplink, as even without a cloud connection all local rulesets and automations will function.

If a couple years ago, the paradigm was to centralize, process and analyze everything in the cloud, azeti and Canonical are demonstrating that this paradigm is now shifting towards the edge of the network. As all the data is processed right where it is generated by sensors and machinery, the need for bandwidth and therefore costs is reduced, local execution of action lowers latency and a network with distributed computing also decreases its vulnerability compared to a centralized approach, which may create a single point of failure.

Reference Use Cases
Remote Maintenance Service for Electric Drives – a great example of how IoT can generate new revenue and optimize operations is the project with one of the largest electrical drives vendors where azeti provides the software stack to collect metrics from the drives and visualizes those in beautiful dashboards. Customer can now check health and performance of their drives in a modern web application without connecting directly to the machinery. Remote maintenance is now offered as a new service by the vendor; the increased visibility into assets allow sophisticated preparation before engineers are sent on site, downtimes are decreased and maintenance efforts are reduced. Customers receive better service and increased uptimes of their environments.

Battery and Generator Management in the Jungle – another real life deployment is with a service provider customer that operates several hundred telecommunication sites in demanding locations such as close to the coast or in deep jungles. The major requirement was to allow remote health checks of their on-site batteries as well as remote maintenance work for the diesel generators. Network uplink is unreliable and visits to the sites have to be reduced as much as possible. azeti’s automation engine gathers performance and health data from installed sensors and directly from the machinery. The operations team can now remotely discharge and charge the batteries, start and stop the generators and gain insights of the whole facility. On top of this, video cameras provide live feeds and access control eliminate the necessity for physical keys. On site visits and maintenance efforts have been tremendously reduced as periodic charging and discharging cycles increase the batteries lifetime heavily and diesel generators are started and stopped on a regular basis to ensure stable operations during times of outages. One of these outages just happened recently during a hurricane where the solution proved its solidness.

Further use cases in logistics, manufacturing, utilities and medical logistics show the variety of IoT solutions – Ubuntu Core for IoT is the layer enabling all the use cases and applications, hardware agnostic, security and easy manageability.

Learn more about azeti here.

smart start

IoT as a service

Bring an IoT device to market fast. Focus on your apps, we handle the rest. Canonical offers hardware bring up, app integration, knowledge transfer and engineering support to get your first device to market. App store and security updates guaranteed.

Get your IoT device to market fast ›

smart start logo

IoT app store

Build a platform ecosystem for connected devices to unlock new avenues for revenue generation. Get a secure, hosted and managed multi-tenant app store for your IoT devices.

Build your IoT app ecosystem ›

Newsletter signup

Get the latest Ubuntu news and updates in your inbox.

By submitting this form, I confirm that I have read and agree to Canonical's Privacy Policy.

Related posts

Canonical’s commitment to quality management

As Canonical approaches its 20th anniversary, we have proven our proficiency in managing a resilient software supply chain. But in the pursuit of excellence,...

Optimised Real-time Ubuntu is now generally available on Intel SoCs

Canonical delivers Real-time Ubuntu on Intel Core processors with TSN and Intel TCC support London, 26 July 2023: Canonical today announced the availability...

Meet Canonical at Embedded World 2024

Embedded World is almost here. With 930+ exhibitors, 200 nonstop hours of knowledge sharing, and an exciting programme structured along 9 tracks with 60+...