Industry is a fundamental sector for the functioning of a country's economic machinery. The more industrialized it is, the greater the benefits to society, from quality of life to the demand for jobs.
Today's industrial ecosystem is driven by the constant need for modernization and increased efficiency to reduce production costs. Optimizing production processes is a challenge that relies on integrated and automated infrastructure collaboration. To achieve this, companies need an interoperable solution capable of collecting data from various equipment, storing it in a structured manner, processing it to create a real-time decision flow, and making it available to other systems passively or even proactively.
IIoT solves a series of problems through monitoring, reducing maintenance operating costs by alerting to deviations from standards in any operation. However, the process is still flawed if we receive an alarm from an engine that is about to undergo maintenance when there is no communication with the inventory control system, indicating that the spare part is in zero quantity.
As expected, a solution involving collaborative infrastructure depends on the integration of equipment and systems across multiple layers that need to be integrated to create the desired solution:
- The first, at the equipment end, is called the integration layer (physical), responsible for connecting and transmitting information from assets that don't always have the same maturity within the plant. This could be equipment with analog sensor interfaces (e.g., 4-20mA), digital ports, controllers (PLCs), or even "smart sensors," which make it difficult to seamlessly connect this entire infrastructure in a decentralized manner. This layer involves researching and purchasing communications equipment with various interfaces for connecting to the desired assets, with significant investments in rapidly evolving assets.
- The second layer, communication, requires the conversion of communication protocols, which vary depending on each application asset. To achieve this, the solution must support the reading of any protocol. Additional development is required for each protocol type and desired conversion.
- The third layer, information, is responsible for storing information in a structured and industry-certified format. This information is then available for consumption by other specialized tools and systems. This layer requires further development to ensure that the information is in a standardized, industry-approved format.
- The fourth layer, which is functional, reflects the need to manage and process this information in real time to generate alarms and predictive notifications. It's necessary to build an interface and intelligence that allows for easy management of this service in a reliable manner capable of securely processing notifications.
- 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 never get off the ground because they depend on the internal development of all these layers within the company and consequently have high labor costs.
In addition to developing systems with programmers, it's necessary to integrate multiple tools from different vendors to create a model that's highly specific to the solution, even in a semi-automatic manner. The result is almost always a "Frankenstein" with little flexibility and a high cost of ownership.
Bridgemeter was created to meet exactly this demand for collaborative infrastructure by 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 internal development time, outside the company's business focus.
The objective is to implement, without any 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.
