Case

Nerve Smart Systems

Connecting products and customers

Goal

Structuring of real-time data for customers and remote monitoring

Granuldisk Beacon Tower Azure IIoT platform

In a matter of days Glaze succeeded to connect the intelligent car chargers from Nerve Smart Systems to Beacon Tower, thereby enabling Nerve Smart Systems to share the data from their chargers to their enterprise customers. This meant, that not only can Nerve Smart Systems now easily remote monitor the chargers, but the customer can now automatically generate reports about usage and customer behaviour.

Overview

The focus in this reference case was the structuring of data from multiple chargers and making insights available to Nerve Smart Systems and its customers.

Data analysis in order to optimise service and support

A traditional battery-buffered fast charger needs to first convert the AC power from the grid to DC to charge the stationary battery, then the DC must be converted to higher power AC sent to the chargers which in turn converts high power AC to DC to finally convert the DC level to match the EV’s required input DC:

The charger from Nerve Smart Systems can adjust the power directly at the cellular level in the battery and can thereby deliver exactly the amount of power needed to charge the electric car as efficiently as possible. All power conversion between the battery and electric car is therefore eliminated as shown in the image below.

The system does not need expensive power electronics and does not lose energy by converting the power multiple times between the battery and the electric car. In the long run, the system can ensure a higher integration of green energy in the electricity grid as the battery can be charged when the proportion of green power in the electricity grid is high.

Large investments for upgrading the electricity grid can be prevented when infrastructure to support e-mobility is being installed. The battery can instead be charged via a relatively small grid connection, or directly from solar cells and other green energy sources. To gain the the positive return of these investments, it is imminent to have a data platform that gives real-time insights about the state and customer behaviour, but also serve as a structured data platform for future projections.

Beacon Tower: A portal for Nerve Smart Systems and its customers

The background for the project was to enable a straightforward sharing of data from the chargers to Nerve Smart Systems’ customer. The Beacon Tower solution was rolled out in a matter of weeks and has been in operation in 2021 and is part of the EU-funded “TOPChargE project”.

The solution consists of the following main building blocks in Beacon Tower:

  • Use of Asset Models to normalise data and easy sharing of data: Each different type of charger has its own Asset Model acting as a digital shadow which again feeds in to a generic charger Asset Model that can thus be normalised in a scalable manner in Beacon Tower. The use of Asset Models also makes it possible to share a customer specific dataset to the customer, while having the whole data foundation available to Nerve Smart Systems.
  • Real time visualisations: By utilising the built-in graph tools in Beacon Tower, Nerve Smart Systems and their customers can compare signals across chargers to easily analyse detected anomalies and visualise the state of the chargers in real time.
  • Dashboards: KPIs are visualised in easily understandable and auto-populated dashboards by aggregating the data from underlying assets. The dashboards are re-useable so Nerve Smart Systems can utilise the same dashboard template across customers and charging stations.
  • Advanced analytics and Machine Learning: By storing all the data in a structured way, Nerve Smart Systems and their customers analyse and learn from historical data in an effective way.

We deliver the platform as a service, which means that we keep developing the service, we update the service regularly and we provide the necessary support for our customers, so they can supply their customers with valuable data – while monitoring the state and usage of the products
Flemming von Holck, Partner in Glaze

We are strong supporters of scalable and open platform architectures. Beacon Tower was a good fit in this use case as it provided out-of-the-box functionalities required by the TOPChargE project including flexibility to develop custom solutions in the future.
Jens Raarup, former CTO in Nerve Smart Systems