By Stefan Hoppe, TwinCAT Product Manager, BECKHOFF Automation; President of the OPC Foundation Europe
Energy monitoring in decentralized real estate properties enables operators to establish energetically optimized statutory management requirements. As an example, the municipal sector often operates up to 2,000 real estate properties via facility management. The energy monitoring system, e2watch® from regio iT Corporation for Information Technology has been developed in cooperation with the real estate and facility management department of the city of Aachen, Germany.
The e2watch® system utilizes a compact Beckhoff controller as a decentralized control unit for data acquisition and buffering. However, the most sophisticated feature is the synchronization with the Cloud using a configurable scheduler. This system uses the manufacturer-independent interoperability standard, OPC-UA (also known as international standard IEC 62541) with integrated security mechanisms as a data transport layer. The collected data gets pushed from a control unit (acting as a PLCopen function block standardized OPC-UA Client) as historical data via a Microsoft SQL database in the Cloud. Dedicated statistical analysis procedures can then executed. Operators, owners and even residents of the real estate properties have access to the results via internet-based visualization applications. Additionally, similar real estate properties may be compared with energy consumption profiles. By enabling access to statistical results in the Cloud, a positive influence in user behavior is expected.
The customer potential for the e2watch® solution from regio iT is obvious and can be translated into a wide variety of markets. The collection, buffering and forwarding of data are ubiquitous tasks, required in countless applications.
Controller with Integrated PLCopen Based OPC-UA Client Collects and Pushes Data
Read more case studies at Beckhoff.com.