Today, many are talking about Industry 4.0. Computer scientists often approach Industry 4.0 from a very technological perspective. They soon realized that industrial technologies, in particular OT, are harder and less sophisticated than the digital and cloud technologies they are familiar with. At GALEO, we got down to work. We add value by bridging the gap between OT and IT. We truly believe in this convergence. We know OT manufacturers very well and how they can integrate modern digital technologies into their high-performance and robust products.
In this post, we show you a real implementation that uses a combination of OT and IT technologies to illustrate a very smart use case today on the electric mobility revolution.
INDUSTRY 4.0. The use case
The rise of native OT/IT convergent systems.
The electric mobility revolution. It is a distributed TO connected to a demand-driven ecosystem.
This is what we have in place:
- EV charging infrastructure must be interconnected by design. It is part of an ecosystem and cannot be understood without connectivity. In our projects, we work with the real material, but here we are simulating the Recharge Point (RP) using a Modbus TCP simulator (server).
- Modbus TCP is widespread and is an industry standard. To interface with the RP, we use a Beckhoff soft-PLC or PC-based PLC. We have a Modbus TCP client and a MQTT software agent. MQTT is a lightweight message protocol very suitable for industrial devices.
- On another machine, a Beckhoff industrial PC again, we have deployed both an MQTT broker and a Kafka producer/consumer. This piece of HW and SW is what we call Edge Gateway. This Gateway allows us to manage the complete life cycle management (LCM) of HW and SW in productive environments. We use Docker as a high-level OS on top of a free BSD native OS.
- The next step is to send real-time data to a highly scalable, enterprise-ready streaming infrastructure like Confluent (Apache Kafka’s enterprise distribution). We have opted for Confluent Cloud provisioned on Azure. Confluent Cloud is a managed service for Kafka’s infrastructure where you don’t have to worry about infrastructure details. You get the value from the beginning by configuring topics and connectors, and that’s it. The Confluent guys work their magic and you get your messages (telemetry, alerts, commands, etc.) right there.
- When you work with Confluent Cloud, you probably ask yourself, is there no tool or interface to view and plot my data? The answer is not yet ;( So you have to come up with something on your own. In our case, we decided to use Node-RED as an automation platform, but also as a dashboard tool. This is the best thing about Node-RED. You can do whatever you want with your data, you have a lot of third party modules (like modules to connect to a Kafka instance) but you can also create simple dashboards to see the data in real time.
In the end, all that remains is to see the real monster at work:
Do you like what you see in this post? Visit https://www.linkedin.com/company/galeo-tech
We would like to thank our partners Beckhoff and Confluent for supporting us and helping us with this initiative.
