16 FeatUre Intelligent Energy Monitoring with Microsoft Azure IoT Suite and TwinCAT IoT Grundfos Living Lab As part of a project to explore energy monitoring and smart metering technologies Grundfos Microsoft and Beckhoff have equipped the Grundfos Kollegiet student dormitory in the Danish town of Århus with intelligent PLC systems that transmit data to an energy monitoring system in Microsoft s Azure cloud computing platform The dormitory is near the town s port district and was built in accordance with the most advanced energy efficiency standards and equipped with the latest building and automation technology The energy monitoring system creates a database for optimizing building operations By including the residents of the Living Lab in the project itself the building owners can increase efficiency without reducing the residents comfort Grundfos Living Lab infrastructure for processing and storing the data Access to the energy monitoring data from the Living Lab can be defined and enabled for a wide range of user groups The information is made available to the building s residents and management as well as to the research and technology department of Grundfos By conducting various studies in connection with the residents and the building management system Grundfos hopes to use the data to identify new usage options for its current products as well as for new product offerings and business models Also involved is the University of Århus which analyzes the connection between resident behavior and energy usage The energy monitoring system is used to store and analyze all energy consumption data as well as for managing alarms The 12 floors of the building house 156 residential units with 3 000 sensors that collect energy data every three seconds and transmit them to the higher level system The sensors are linked to Beckhoff BC9191 Bus Couplers and CX9020 Embedded PCs A central Beckhoff Industrial PC runs the TwinCAT IoT Data Agent software to collect sensor data via OPC UA and functions as the gateway to Microsoft s Azure cloud in particular the Azure IoT Hub The TwinCAT IoT Data Agent effectively separates the PLC systems from the cloud environment Thanks to the publisher subscriber mechanisms and communication via the Azure IoT Hub as a central message broker there is no need for the devices and services involved in the communication process to divulge their addresses to each other They communicate exclusively via the central broker which The first version of the Grundfos project was implemented as early as 2012 by installing a special server infrastructure and database in the building As the monitoring cycles grew shorter and the amount of data needed for the seamless analysis of current and historical conditions larger administering this IT infrastructure became increasingly expensive in terms of both money and personnel Protecting access to all this data by various groups of users also required increasingly complex systems In order to meet these requirements in the future the parties involved in the project decided in 2015 to redesign the project and migrate the server infrastructures to a cloud based system As part of this change Beckhoff s highly scalable control technology demonstrated its flexibility providing a seamless retrofit of the local building automation platform with a link to the cloud The PLCs and I O subsystems now transmit the energy data to the cloud based system via TwinCAT IoT software which is easy to configure and does not require programming Microsoft s Azure cloud platform provides everything necessary to create a fast scalable by Beckhoff Automation Sdn Bhd

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