Data Warehouse Platform for Energy & Utilities
Value Proposition:
With the transition to green and renewable energy, the Energy & Utilities industry, whether it is utility of water, district heating or power, has many exciting and necessary challenges ahead.
There are many use cases in the future Energy & Utilities industry such as smart and micro-grids, power-to-x, heat pump systems, connected building automation systems, intelligent district heating, etc. What they all have in common is that they rely heavily on live data and often need to integrate with other stakeholders’ systems.
Challenge:
IoT cloud platforms for Energy & Utilities industries require the ability to gather and consolidate data from a huge array of different systems and devices that are often made by different vendors and have different owners.
Some data is to be shared with partners, while other data is sensitive and needs to be strictly controlled.
This requires a flexible and potent platform allowing the integration of everything with a strict control of who gets to see what.
How Beacon Tower fits:
Beacon Tower is a Data Warehouse platform for the Energy & Utilities industry as it has an advanced access control allowing the owner of a system or a device and its data to share it with whomever they want.
Any number of actors can have sensors in the platform and either share or get data through the platform itself or through various APIs.
This means data can be sent to bigger data lakes or into other platforms, allowing Beacon Tower to act as a complete IoT data platform for an Energy & Utilities industry or as part of one.
Key Beacon Tower functionalities supporting the Energy & Utilities industry
Models your business
Assets can be structured in ‘node hierarchies’, allowing you to model Beacon Tower after your business. Model them by geographical location, customers, asset properties – or all of them – supporting different roles within your organisation. Beacon Tower can further be white labelled in multiple layers. This allows you to provide Beacon Tower as a platform for your products if needed.
Condition Monitoring
The Real Time Telemetry processing is the core of Beacon Tower’s signal processing. It allows you to create rules that triggers alarms or actions within milliseconds from receiving the signal.
Visualize telemetry in graphs allowing you to see trends, compare signals and understand your assets. You can customize a dashboard for each type of asset and for each node in the node hierarchy to ensure the right information is always available.
Asset & Device Management
A core component in any IoT platform is the device manager. In Beacon Tower we use a state-of-the-art scalable device manager that can manage any number of devices. It supports updating firmware or properties on single devices, batches or all devices of a certain type, depending on your needs. It can also provide a full overview of what devices are working properly and which devices have lost connection or are behaving irregularly.
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Data Integration
Beacon Tower can gather data from any type of device or data source. Make use of standalone devices or gateways with multiple peripheral devices that can be directly managed by Beacon Tower. You can also integrate network services or device clouds from other providers making Beacon Tower your central repository for all IoT Data. We can help you build integrations to legacy systems where proxy servers or applications are needed to bring the data into Beacon Tower without modifying the legacy systems.
Machine Learning
Beacon Tower can supply Machine Learning services with either data from the telemetry storage or directly from the real-time telemetry stream for time critical algorithms. Either make use of your own Machine Learning platform or we can help you to set it up with one of our AI/Machine Learning partners.
Nested Organisations
Beacon Tower has a flexible hierarchical access system that allow you, your customers and their customers into Beacon Tower. You can decide what level of autonomy your customers should have, i.e. if they manage their own data, devices or users.
Relevant links:
Please refer to the Platform page for more info about features and functionalities.
Reap business benefits by combining external data with time-series and machine data
How data structure and open data models enable effective AI on time-series and machine data
Your IoT platform as an integration service, product or as building blocks?
What is Edge Computing?
How do we get started with a Data Warehouse for the Energy & Utilities industry?
01
Inception
The utility sector is complex from an IoT perspective as actors are in vastly different corners. Some are in the public sector with a monopoly where data integration to new production facilities are needed, others have increasing pressure from law makers to provide new services to support an environmental switch while others are competing in the sensor and product forefront. In the end it comes down to connecting a diverse array of systems and a large number of devices with cost effectiveness, reliability and low maintenance high in the agenda. There are usually plenty of technical and organisational challenges when moving into the IoT Utility space; what connectivity should be used, what technology choices are future proof and how do we prevent being vendor locked in?
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How we can help design the solution
To reduce the number of uncertainties Beacon Tower can be the data Data Warehouse that can integrate with your currently planned and future deployed systems and devices. By having a well-designed API & integration layer we can also make integrations with other systems or actors much simpler. This allows you to focus on the value creation from their data e.g. within production optimisation, forecasting, reporting and leak detection.
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Technology & Initial Pilots
Usually, multiple pilots are run and scaled up as risks and uncertainties are removed and the design finalized. First it starts with validating the technology choices and software. After that small scale tests will be run in the real world and often ending with a real roll-out to a subset of your users. While it is of course important that the tests are successful, it’s as important that the different tests are designed properly and remove the risks that are still present.
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How Beacon Tower secures an effective Pilot
Beacon Tower can provide a cost-effective solution for a small number of of systems and devices that only takes a few days to integrate into Beacon Tower. You can quickly get going, and when you scale up your tests Beacon Tower removes the Data Warehouse platform as a potential issue as it is a well-tested platform having done the same before.
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Rolling out
Rolling out, integrating to numerous production facilities and maybe even integrating to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of devices, is where the reliability and scalability of the solution will immediately be tested. Any performance issues or bottlenecks will immediately lead to issues and a delayed roll-out. It’s also now any cost calculations will be tested to see that the maintenance and support required does not consume more time than expected
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How Beacon Tower makes the roll-out less stressful
Beacon Tower is continuously load tested and have multiple fail-safes to manage higher than expected loads. It provides a cost model that is easily scalable and does not provide any surprises along the way. Our tools to monitor the platform and individual devices will allow you to keep a hawk eye on everything during the critical period of the initial roll-out.