Abstract:

Industrial monitoring systems have a paramount role in automated facilities for continuous surveillance of the process behaviour, data visualization, as well as for decision taking. On the other hand, modern paradigms such as Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (Industrial IoT) are penetrating and achieving presence in industry. Distributed architectures, advanced communications, massive data storage and analytics are some of the features involved in those paradigms and, hence, impact in the design of monitoring and supervisory systems.

Therefore, engineering students in industrial automation-related disciplines need to acquire knowledge and skills in such concepts and technologies for a proper professional development. To this purpose, at the University of Extremadura, within the Electrical Engineering Degree, a course devoted to industrial monitoring and supervision has served as scenario to introduce an IoT software for monitoring tasks. In particular, the IoT and open source suite Grafana has been presented to students during theoretical sessions and they have carried out a set of designs, configurations and initial tests with this software. In addition, other required components consist of MySQL database server and management system, together with a web navigator, Mozilla Firefox. All this packages are lightweight and easily available for students due to the fact that they are free and open-source, which facilitates their usage without restrictions related to licensing expenditures. Furthermore, it must be noted that Grafana has been reported in literature as versatile and successful monitoring technology in a number of facilities in energy sector [1, 2] and in Industry 4.0 [3, 4].

Namely, as a proof of concept, the visualization of the State of Charge of a Lithium-ion battery has been performed. This data is retrieved from a database and plotted in a time-series graph through a web-based monitoring system. The software environments and the conducted initial experience are described, together with educational considerations.

References:
[1] I. González, A.J. Calderón, F.J. Folgado. “IoT real time system for monitoring lithium-ion battery long-term operation in microgrids,” Journal of Energy Storage, vol. 51, 104596, 2022.
[2] J.M. Portalo, I. González, A.J. Calderón. “Monitoring System for Tracking a PV Generator in an Experimental Smart Microgrid: An Open-Source Solution,” Sustainability, vol.13, 8182, 2021.
[3] R.P. Pontarolli, J.A. Bigheti, F.O. Domingues, L.B.R. de Sá, E.P. Godoy. “Distributed I/O as a service: A data acquisition solution to Industry 4.0,” Hardware X, vol.12, e00355, 2022.
[4] T. Gkamas, V. Karaiskos, S. Kontogiannis. “Performance Evaluation of Distributed Database Strategies Using Docker as a Service for Industrial IoT Data: Application to Industry 4.0,” Information, vol. 13, 190, 2022.

Keywords:

Internet of Things, IoT software, Grafana, Industrial monitoring, Supervisory systems, Engineering education.