Cloud-O-Col for PLCS Using IoT

Discrete manufacturing industries or Job Shops often involve usage of PLCs from different vendors with different communication protocols for various operations. So data from all the PLCs cannot be acquired collectively as PLCs cannot communicate with PLCs from other vendors or which uses other protocols for communication. This is a barrier in communication which obstructs efficient data transfer. Thereby a field user with minimal technical knowledge cannot acquire the data and in a similar fashion this barrier leads to a lot of issues like inefficient data circulation. The existing solution to overcome this barrier includes usage of dedicated SCADA or DCS, usage of high end PLCs to employ Master-Slave communication, costly protocol converters, deployment of OPC Servers etc. In all these cases the cost involved is too high for a medium scale industry to fully utilize the aspect of efficient communication. The idea behind the project is to develop a black box where the inputs can be any process associated with any PLCs(different vendors/protocols) and the output will be collective data stream which is cleaned, scrutinized and can be delivered to specific personnel in a way to break the communication barrier by utilization of IoT and Cloud Computing.