About: jesper_christensen

LoRaWAN: A low power wide area network with wide reach. An open standard that runs at unlicensed frequencies, where you establish a network with gateways.

Sigfox: A low power wide area network reminiscent of LoRa. Offered in Denmark by IoT Danmark, which operates the nationwide network that integrates seamlessly to other national Sigfox networks in the world.

NFC: Used especially for wireless cash payments.

Zigbee: Used especially for home automation in smart homes, for example. lighting control.

NB-IoT: Telecommunications companies’ IoT standard. A low-frequency version of the LTE network.

2-3-4G Network: Millions of devices are connected to a small SIM card, which runs primarily over 2G, but also 3G and 4G.

Wifi: The most established standard, especially used for short-range networks, for example. in production facilities.

CATM1: A low power wide area network, especially used in the United States.

Glaze IoT Cloud Project Process

Beacon Tower is Glaze’s Industrial IoT Cloud Platform that can act as either a stepping stone (Platform-as-a-Service, PaaS) or as an out-of-the-box solution (Software-as-a-Service, SaaS) for collection of IoT-data.

Beacon Tower resides in Microsoft Azure and is designed as a customisable and cost-effective IIoT Cloud Platform that helps simplify deploying, managing, operating, and capturing insights from internet-of things (IoT)-enabled devices. Our customers have the full ownership of their data.

When running it as a PaaS we utilise the design and can run it on our customers’ Azure tenant and customise it fully to their requirements.

Beacon Tower connects to all sensors, PLC, DCS, SCADA, ERP, Historians and MES to gain maximum automation flexibility and ​prevent vendor lock-in.

For more information visit www.beacontower.io or read the PDF.

Edge Computing Categories and Questions

Device:
o Sensors
o Internet connectivity
o Battery consumption
o Field Gateway
o Communication protocols (HTTP, AMQP, MQTT, Gateway)
o Format of the telegrams sent to the cloud (JSON, Avro, etc.)

Data:
o Number of devices & number of signals
o Amount of data to transfer per day
– Event-based or batched or mix
– Transfer rate (every second, minute, hour)
o Device timestamps
– Synchronized timestamps with cloud or not
– Local buffering on device, late and/or repeated data
o Any time-critical notifications / alarms
– Latency expectations for non-time critical data
– Alarms generated by device and/or by cloud platform
o Cloud-to-device messages & commands
o Analytics
– Results from time-series data / Streaming analytics
– Analytics workflows on data, machine learning etc.
– Edge analytics / intelligence

Cost expectations:
o Retention periods (for reporting purposes)
o Aggregation of data, possibilities for cost saving

External integrations:
o Reference data / online data

Administration, rights and access:
o Requirements for multi-tenancy (segregated owners)
o Owners/tenants and operators/technicians
o Administrating access to data, auditing use
o API management, consumption of data, 3rd party integrators

Operation:
o KPI measurements for device
o KPI measurements for cloud platform
o Requirements on operators and SLA’s

User-interfaces and functions:
o Operators/technicians
o Customers/end-users

Glaze Business Innovation and Development Framework (BIDF)

1. Strategy

Creating an IoT Strategy that aligns with the existing company strategy and/or points out any discrepancies that needs to be addressed. The IoT Strategy should pinpoint type of IoT opportunities that should be sought and how they can support the Company delivering on their overall strategies.

2. Ideation

The Ideation phase is an innovative and creative phase where we identify the IoT opportunities within the company. This is done by using existing assets, industry expertise, industry analysis, strategy and IoT expertise to find opportunities for IoT endeavors. This is done in an structured but open-minded and creative setting.

3. Refinement

In Refinement the opportunities are detailed, prioritized and evaluated in a series of steps with the goal of finding a short list of initiatives the company want to pursue. These steps takes strategy, competence, risk level, customer maturity etc into account during prioritization.

4. Valuation

The short list of opportunities are detailed even further and business cases are created for each of them. This will lead to a decision which opportunity to pursue further.

Moving on from the Business Innovation phases to Development activities we focus on taking the minimum possible risk of building the wrong solution by using agile development practices.

5. Exploration

Proof of Concepts carried out in this phase in order to map out technology as well as user-oriented risks. This also refines the budget and thus valuation and business case. Also giving valuable input to baseline system architecture and eco system involvement.

6. Planning

Moving to Planning phase, the most promising business case has been selected and now it is time to plan the Minimal Viable Product (MVP), in terms of timeline, resources and detailed design.

7. Foundation

Implementing the baseline architecture, toolchains and most critical points of the project.

8. Development

Full MVP is developed using these three principles: Start small, don’t over-engineer; Agile software development – late changes welcomed; Continuous delivery – every change is immediately visible.

9. Operations

Operations in an IoT-project is more than just keeping the product alive. It is life-long updates and continous sharpening of features and business model, meaning new ideas are fed back in the Innovation and Development Framework.

Heat map example on a typical business case: