Development of a WSN based real time energy monitoring platform for industrial applications

In recent years, with significantly increasing pressures from both energy price and the scarcity of energy resources have dramatically raised sustainability awareness in the industrial sector where the effective energy efficient process planning and scheduling are urgently demanded. To response this trend, development of a low cost, high accuracy, great flexibility and distributed real time energy monitoring platform is imperative. This paper presents the design, implementation, and testing of a remote energy monitoring system to support energy efficient sustainable manufacturing in an industrial workshop based on a hierarchical network architecture by integrating WSNs with Internet communication into a knowledge and information services platform. In order to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system, the system has been implemented in a real shop floor to evaluate with various production processes. The assessing results showed that the proposed system has significance in practice of discovering energy relationships between various manufacturing processes which can be used to support for machining scheme selection, energy saving discovery and energy quota allocation in a shop floor.