Industry is a fundamental sector for the functioning of a country's economic mechanism. The more industrialized, the greater the benefits for society, from quality of life to the demand for jobs.
Currently, the industrial ecosystem is guided by the constant need for modernization and increased efficiency to reduce production costs. Optimizing production processes is a challenge that depends on infrastructure collaboration in an integrated and automatic way. To achieve this, companies need an interoperable solution capable of collecting data from different devices, storing it in a structured way, processing it to create a real-time decision flow, and making it passively available to other systems. or even proactive.
IIoT solves a series of problems through monitoring, reducing operational maintenance costs as it is capable of warning about deviations from standards in any operation. However, the process is still flawed if we receive an alarm from an engine that is close to maintenance when there is no communication with the system that controls stock and indicates zero quantity of this spare part.
As expected, a solution that involves collaborative infrastructure depends on the integration of equipment and systems in several layers that need to be integrated to compose the desired solution:
- The first, at the equipment end, called the (physical) integration layer, responsible for connecting and transmitting information about assets that do not always have the same maturity in the plant. In other words, it can be equipment with an analog sensor interface (e.g. 4~20mA), digital ports, controllers (PLCs) or even “smart sensors”, which make it difficult to uniformly connect this entire infrastructure in a decentralized way. This layer involves the research and purchase of communication equipment with varied interfaces to connect to the desired assets with high investments in assets with rapid technological evolution.
- The second layer, of communication, where we need to convert communication protocols that vary according to each asset of the application and for this the solution must allow the reading of any protocol. Additional developments are required for each type of protocol and desired conversion.
- The third layer, information, responsible for storing information in a structured way and certified by the industry. This information is available for consumption by other specialized tools and systems. At this layer, additional developments are required to ensure that the information is in a standardized, industry-approved format.
- The fourth layer is functionalities and reflects the need to manage and process this information in real time to generate alarms and predictive notifications. It is necessary to build an interface and intelligence that allows easy management of this service in a reliable way capable of processing notifications securely.
- Finally, the fifth layer is the business layer responsible for interoperability with operational, maintenance and customer relationship management systems, generating process triggers necessary for complete process automation.
Most IIoT projects are slow and often do not get off the ground as they depend on the internal development of all these layers within the company and consequently high labor costs.
In addition to developing systems with programmers, it is necessary to integrate several tools from different suppliers to be able to assemble a model that is very specific to the solution, even semi-automatically. The result is almost always a “Frankenstein” with little flexibility and high cost of ownership.
Bridgemeter was created to meet exactly this demand for collaborative infrastructure, integrating the 5 layers in a true digitization process (not to be confused with digitalization), in a turn-key model that eliminates the need for development, programming team expenses and development time internal, outside the company's business focus.
The objective is to implement, at no CAPEX cost, in a very short space of time, a solution that offers information collection, alerts, notifications, triggers and auditing in a fully automatic way with benefits for operation and maintenance based on a solution as a service.
