Governments around the world have been pursuing renewable energy sources in response to global warming and abnormal weather events. Advanced solar power generators collect on-site data using an advanced metering infrastructure and smart system able to integrate all types of plant equipment for monitoring and managing operational efficiency. Advantech’s WISE-EdgeLink solutions help to integrate the many different types of systems, equipment, and protocols, making them ideally suited to the renewable energy management sector.

Wireless connectivity is required for monitoring infrastructure utilities such as water pump stations, oil and gas stations, electricity substations, and heating supply systems to enable reliable data transmission. The use of different PLCs for monitoring and controlling these utilities is expensive and necessitates complex system integration. Accordingly, many customers prefer to use all-in-one devices for data collection and transmission, as well as system monitoring, and alarm notification.

Given the high level of energy and water consumption in factories, being able to monitor and control energy-related systems can have a sizable effect on operational costs. For industrial boilers, air compressors, chillers, power distribution cabinets, and other facilities, WISE-EdgeLink serves as a hub for data acquisition, storage, reports and alarm notifications, maximizing equipment efficiency with the provision of accurate data.

Equipment builders that thrive on improving equipment efficiency understand the importance of quality data in the analysis of machine status. WISE-EdgeLink supports data conversion, enabling equipment used for mass production, such as PLCs, sensors, and inverters, to be directly integrated with SCADA, MES, and ERP systems for convenient operation and maintenance.

Quality assurance is important to company sustainability. Manufacturers are seeking faster and more accurate solutions to acquire valid data in order to decrease quality assurance inspection times, and increase product traceability. Advantech’s WISE-EdgeLink is not only able to acquire and transmit data from sensors such as barcode readers, meters, sensors and IO, but also offers basic data pre-processing and analytic capabilities, provides real-time quality data records for industrial manufacturing, helping companies to detect defects and take action to reduce errors.

A significant proportion of energy is wasted due to inadequate control and management. This has prompted many buildings worldwide to adopt energy conservation measures and introduce automated systems to replace traditional management models that rely on manual inspections. More advanced buildings have even adopted intelligent operations and maintenance (O&M) platforms, and now use automated controls to reduce overall energy consumption. O&M data retrieved from equipment must be converted from specific communication protocol formats at the data gateway before integration in a central management system, thus making the data palatable for monitoring and control purposes.