Remote Monitoring and Control of Industrial Equipment Through OPC UA and Cloud Computing

Abstract

Enterprises in green energy and decarbonizing sectors are adopting more value-driven strategies by engaging in the hyper-digital era. New business models are thereby emerging that offer new values for manufacturers and customers over partnership programs and transition to the service-driven solutions thanks to the technologies of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). A major growing sector that has a high capacity to gain from the new paradigm is green hydrogen production. Manufacturers can aim at Servitization of the equipment operation and deliver the Equipment as a Service (EaaS) solution while the customer pays per use of the equipment outputs. Realization of EaaS has multi-discipline concerns among which the IT-OT convergence poses as the key enabler and is entitled more for diffusion in the industry. In this context, it is desired to study both ends of the alignment and the unification method that altogether should enable an EaaS scenario with remote Monitoring and Control (M&C) capability. To this end, one perception is that substantial part of the EaaS solution requires development of Equipment model that constitutes the Equipment service context from design stage and creating a digital interface to the instantiated Equipment running at the shop floor for cloud-based Monitoring and Control (M&C) purposes. In this thesis, a typical EaaS solution is presented based on an abstract model of a green hydrogen production unit using the concepts of OPC UA framework and simulated control logics. Further, the interoperability between the contextualized Equipment and the cloud platform is studied considering the generic cloud user is unaware of the OPC UA implementation. To achieve the best connectivity solution between the Equipment in user’s premises and the manufacturer’s cloud service, the architectural and infrastructural requirements are discussed. An integration approach for M&C purpose of EaaS is presented leveraging a combined capability of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and IIoT architectures which results in a Data-driven and Event-driven infrastructure. The solution depicts an extent of various layers of functionalities in a three-tier building block scheme as Hardware-Connectivity-Application that realizes the M&C of an EaaS with desired digital interface. The proposed M&C solution for the EaaS scenario is implemented using concrete open-source technologies, selected programming languages and application development frameworks and resulted in an end-to-end digital interface serving a generic web user for M&C of the Equipment. Furthermore, Justifications are given for the use of each concrete part of the total solution and practical observations. The results of the M&C are presented from both the simulated Equipment server display and the web user interface display and the correspondence between the two environments shows the successful integration. In the end, the future work prospects are pointed out as to deploy more advanced technologies on the different layers of the proposed integration and develop scalable solutions such as setting up M&C of multi- EaaS use cases, development of criteria for many-to-many IIoT solutions and considering competitor technologies to OPC UA framework.