IoT Solution for Energy Optimization in Industry 4.0: Issues of a Real-life Implementation

The fourth industrial revolution -the so called Industry 4.0 strategy- fosters to provide devices/assets/machines at industrial plants with a reliable connectivity, by means of the use of innovative technologies such as Cyber Physical Systems, Internet of Things, Cloud and Big Data services. Energy consumption monitoring in manufacturing plants provides useful information to save energy while reducing CO2 emissions, but also for predictive maintenance or process optimization applications what results in costs reduction. This paper describes an Open-IoT solution to measure energy consumption in factories that reveal in detail the use of energy at each industrial machine and the energy consumed to perform a particular industrial process. This solution, based on BatNET wireless communication technology, has been installed worldwide at 16 factories dedicated to the manufacture of steel and aluminum parts for the automotive industry. BatNET is built on open and standard protocols and it was initially envisaged for building and Smart City applications. Some adaptations in hardware, firmware and software have been required to fulfil the industrial harsh environment. The implementation issues faced when installing this Industrial IoT system in real environments are presented in this paper. Special attention has been paid to the constraints motivated by factory requirements and embedded processing and data storage capabilities, as well as their solutions and the final results.