With the rise of Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT), factory and equipment manufacturers are finding that implementing automation intheir operations not only improves throughput and quality but provides other benefits as well.
Our customer in the Europe was looking for a palm-size IoT gateway to implement in their production line to collect data and optimize the production efficiency. However, there are many different machines and devices in the market that are using different protocols to communicate,which makes data collection harder. The IoT gateway solution was not only required to meet the limited installation and harsh operating environment,but also able to covert different protocols for communication.
Advantech offers a IoT gateway solution UTX-3117 along with AlleantiaI 4.0 Plug & Play Solutions. UTX-3117 uses the latest Intel Atom E3900 series, Celeron N3350, and Pentium N4200 series processor technology to provide a real-time IoT computing, power-efficient, plug & play gateway solution. Alleantia I4.0 Plug & Play Solutions bridges the OT and IT, and it solves the complexity of the brown-field by abstracting into a consistent data model which can feed various applications. It includes more than 5,000 device drivers from 30+ vendors and provides to upper layers an abstract data representation.
UTX-3117 is designed with 3 RF modules with 5 antennas which serves as the core for RF and wireless data collected from the sensors and devices in wide area. UTX-3117 supports various protocols including LowPAN, Zigbee, WiFi, BLE, LoRa, NB-IOT, and analyses useful data before sending it to the Cloud via 3G/LTE, WiFi,Ethernet. UTX-3117 uses an optimized thermal design that can sustain full load operation in -20~60 °C and also supports 12-24V DC input to meet the factory environment needs.
By integrated with Alleantia I4.0 Plug & Play Solutions, the UTX can connect various industrial machinery,equipment and devices based on a machine driver concept. The Alleantia I4.0 Plug & Play Solutions contains more than 5000 machine drivers including: Photovoltaic, Power inverters, Power meters, I/O module, LV/MV breaker, PLCs, CNCs where customer can create new encrypted machine driver by themselves. Its non-silo architecture also facilitates interoperability and IT-OT system integration.