Edge Computing supporting On-Time Diagnostics of Industrial Motor Drives

In the industrial context, the transformation of any process related information to a digital format affects the entire company, from administration to production and logistics (digitization). This paper focuses on Edge Computing, which consists in extending the scope of a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) from the standard coordination and control of an industrial drive, to include a Condition Monitoring process. The latter can be implemented without interference with the regular real time control operation of the plant, and still a number of relevant data are detected and processed on-time, both to monitor the quality of the operation, and to perform Diagnostics Algorithms. The software architecture and some relevant experimental results are reported in the paper