MHP
It is very often required to develop an IoT solution from the scratch. A company wants to implement IoT in their already existing IT environment. Therefore, it is necessary to aggregate data from existing machines and sensors with environmental data from new sensors. That’s why we start with easy to use devices and an established IoT platform in order to not reinvent the wheel again and again.
In this scenario we define that we want to create an automated internal production supply system. We’ve a set of machines and each machine knows what it will produce within the next two days. Normally a machine produces the same product for about one hour then the setup will be changed. Each product such a machine produces consists of some parts which have to be supplied to the machine before it can start to produce. To save storage and eliminate waiting time this has to be done nearly in real time. The product’s parts should be delivered by some system which will be not part of this hackaton. But for this system, there is some web API which can be used to get information about how long it will take to deliver a defined number of specific parts to a dedicated machine location. This system is limited, so it is dependent on already planned orders how long it will take to deliver a specific part to a specific location. This fact is more important considering that a machine can firstly order new parts when it has completely finished the last production. This means the time to get new parts for the next production is a complete downtime of production of this machine. The order in which the machines produce specific products has a direct influence on the time it needs to do its work. Because it is only important that all machines produce all required products, within a period of two days it is possible to adapt the production sequence in order to reduce downtimes.
As already explained a machine has a downtime between producing two products. All parts are marked with RFID tags already. This leads us to the solution to roll out RFID readers before the machines in order to check that all needed parts have arrived already to automatically trigger the next production. Information about part’s RFID can be obtained from the above-mentioned system which is represented by a web API.
We will setup a machine supply area with RFID readers to check if the machine can start its work. We will use web API to obtain information and publish aggregated information about machines and production. We’ll use Crosstalk as RFID back-end and MicroSoft Azure as back-end for our web API.
- Setup RFID readers to read tags from delivered product parts (for 1-2 machines)
- Create a web API which can used to obain information about planned production for the next two days for each machine
- Create dashboard for each machine displaying its status, actual task, next task and so on
- Create an overview dash board for the “whole” production
- (Optional) Optimize production plan to reduce time
- Crosstalk
- MicroSoft Azure
- RFID
- Web API