An Innovative American Manufacturing company makes its Cranes smart & connected

Our Client leverages Cloud connectivity and HMI (Human-Machine Interface) based platforms like Tablets & Apps, any device having PLC based automation systems working can be extended to become an IoT & Mobility based Smart Device in turn accruing the benefits these technologies bring on the table.

Business challenge

The global cranes market size is expected to reach USD 45.80 billion by 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 4.1% between 2020 and 2027. Given the sheer density of configuring, operating, and maintaining these mega systems, we need to make a shift to our legacy data accessioning models. In early days the crane systems data points are accessed, operated, and modified at the floor level. Only the operators at the floor level have access to all the data, and it would be difficult for the crane manufacturers to get an insight of the data.

Cloud IoT Solution

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solution begins with intelligent sensors to connect machines to people and things to the network. The IoT Edge Gateway was used to connect to the Crane System and read the telemetry data points from the drives and integrated sensors. The Edge Gateway’s computing capabilities was used to parse the data and only send a subset of data to the cloud based on triggered events. This effectively lowered the cost of operation and data management.

In IoT Edge Gateway, an application is written to connect to crane systems and collect all required data points at the line rate speed. The collected telemetry data is run through a stream of complex functions to perform machine learning, health check, and event triggers. Based on the output of the functions, local processing of data is performed. The processed data is sent to the cloud on a low cost, secured, lossless communication channel. Once the data is stored in the cloud, IoT Cloud Application can further process the data, apply complex analytics functions over  machine data. The final processed data is presented to operators and manufacturers in different formats like time series graphs, cumulative graphs, reports, notifications, and alerts.

Business Results

The proof of concept was successfully demonstrated. The solution proved to solve several challenges faced in unified visibility of telemetry and analytics for different kinds of users and availability of data from anywhere in the world for any period. With IoT Edge Gateway computing, data costs are significantly reduced by ensuring the raw data is processed and only the useful data is sent to the cloud