A Cloud-Based Service for the Visualization and Monitoring of Factories

• Published in: Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering pp. 141 - 157
• Main Authors: Prévost, Guillaume, Blech, Jan Olaf, Foster, Keith, Schmidt, Heinrich W.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: Cloud-based services; Data visualization; Industrial automation
• ISBN: 3319941348; 9783319941349
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-94135-6_7

With standard networking technologies gaining access to the factory floors, remote monitoring and visualization of the collected information is an important topic in the field of industrial automation. Information may be used for remote operation of a production plant, for planning and conducting maintenance, for incident analysis, and for optimization purposes. In this paper, we present a framework for the collection and visualization of data streaming from industrial automation devices such as machines in factories or robots. An important part of our framework is the use of cloud-based services to collect data from programmable logic controllers (PLCs). PLCs are used to control machines such as grippers and conveyor belts. PLCs send data to our services and clients such as analysis or visualization services can subscribe to these data channels in accordance with customer needs. Here, we focus on the visualization services themselves. In our work, data from industrial automation facilities is associated with formal semantic models. For example, a formal semantic model can be a mathematical representation of the material flow in a production plant. In general, the formal semantic models are used to represent interdependencies between entities, their functionality and other descriptive elements. Formal semantic models are in the visualization and for reasoning about systems. In order to complement the visualization and cloud-based services work, we present our demonstrator. Our demonstrator comprises an example factory, we are using Raspberry Pi-based controllers as PLCs. These are connected with each other and to the internet using standard ethernet technology. This paper is an extended version of a previously published paper [18] by the same authors.