Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, a global leader in factory automation (FA) applications, identified edge computing as a critical component of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The company aimed to enhance device and data security, reduce data traffic to the cloud, and enable faster response to network or device issues. In 2018, Mitsubishi Electric launched its first line of industrial hardware products designed for edge computing, the MELIPC Series. The primary development goals for MELIPC were to support the type of edge computing promoted by Mitsubishi Electric and to introduce advanced vision technology for device control. The flagship computer of the MELIPC line, the MI5000, was designed to combine real-time equipment control with high-speed data collection, processing, diagnosis, and feedback in a single machine. However, the development team needed a real-time control platform that could seamlessly integrate real-time control with proven analytic and diagnostic applications.

US Highway 2 at Kalispell, Montana, features a dangerous, non-signalized intersection that has been the site of numerous crashes. The two-lane, high-speed highway intersects with Springcreek Road/Dern Road and has no turn lane. The goal of the project was to improve safety at the intersection without adding lanes or installing signals. Because there is no turn lane, when eastbound cars need to turn left onto Springcreek Road they are forced to stop in the lane of travel and hope that cars approaching from behind see them and stop in time. Unfortunately, too many drivers didn’t see the stopped vehicles until it was too late, resulting in numerous crashes. The posted speed limit on that stretch of US Highway 2 is 65 mph, and the road is heavily traveled by large semis. Finally, funding issues made a build-out of the intersection unfeasible.

Intermatic needed a solution to help their customers drastically reduce costs associated with making sure all billboard lights were on and working properly. The traditional method was costly, time consuming and inefficient as may billboards are located in isolated regions.

Power Catalyst needed a solution that can support massive amounts of mission-critical data with no disruption for customers. Antiquated system wasn’t scalable and couldn’t support disaster recovery and could not deploy applications on a service basis with a quick turnaround.

Because of the scale of the facility and its reliance upon automated conveyor systems, technical information such as alarm or failure messages were dicult to dispatch to onsite staff who could not actively communicate with logistics and production engineers when outside the control room. This delayed response times and increase meant system downtime, often causing fresh produce to be wasted.

Due to its ever increasing customers and connections Wyless required more scalability and efficiency but definitely at a cheaper cost. Usage records & calculations for more than 2 million connections does not reside in gigabyte of space, it requires terabytes of space. Where connectivity is the key to your success or failure in business, you don’t want your machines to be responsible for slow response. Wyless had all of its servers managed at another hosting. Ex-Hosting became non-scalable to support the ever-expanding needs of expansion Wyless required. But moving instance from Ex-hosting was the biggest challenge. Wyless had issues of stability, network availability, scalability & OS. Resulting in not able to scale up the resources like Disk, CPU and Ram without incurring downtime.

Energy generation and management, when not optimized, severely damages the results. If costs are not closely controlled or the production is not predicted accurately, profit can be dramatically diminished or even lead to losses. It is therefore mandatory for energy producers to optimize the management to maximize profitability.

Ready2Wash needed a partner who can connect a diverse set of machines, systems, and sensors, many of which communicate on different protocols, onto a single platform and make them visible and controllable. Furthermore, the amount of data, data types, and their applications were so vast, that the solution handling it needed to be scalable and flexible.

Lower oil prices compel oilfield operators to increase efficiency. The client, a leading oilfield services provider, sought to significantly reduce the costs of pumping oil. The client owns and operates tens of thousands of electric submersible pumps (ESPs) for its global oil-and-gas customers.

After spending millions on an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) infrastructure, including CO2, compressors, pipelines, injection wellheads, and fluid separators, Chaparral began to see its long-term investment pay off as oil production increased. However, when a CO2 compressor fails, CO2 volumes to the pipeline plummet by 50% or more. The operator needed predictive intelligence to prevent such an event.

VITAS sees mobile technology as the key to better connecting patients and caregivers. “Mobile technology will allow us to communicate information and route caregivers quickly and efficiently,” says Patrick Hale, senior vice-president and CIO at VITAS. “But before attempting revolutionary work, we needed to lay down the infrastructure.”Due to fast growth, the company lacked a strong, consolidated network. By standardizing on Cisco network and communication solutions, VITAS gains the stability and visibility that it needs to introduce new applications that bring together patients, families, and top-quality healthcare services.

Due to the needs of its service area, the new healthcare campus doubled in size. With the vast size difference between the old and new hospital, Parkland had to address several issues — the most critical being adjustments in the day-today patient care provided by its clinical staff. The sheer size of the patient floors — nearly the length of two football fields — was a challenge. That size drove caregivers from a centralized care model to a decentralized one — creating the need to change how communication and collaboration happens.

For automated dairy systems, maintaining precise environmental conditions is essential; the products (cheeses, milk, butter, ice cream, etc.) are temperature sensitive. Whether during the high-heat phases of bacteria removal and pasteurization or the refrigeration of finished products, a change in temperature can render an entire batch unusable.

Earth moving machines require an immense energy source to provide the power they need for use within civil engineering works. ‘Hydraulic Motors’ allow this power to be applied to enable the machines movement and in addition ‘Control Valves’ also provide the operator with the precise feel and control required to undertake the necessary tasks needed for such machines, including trenching, rock breaking and demolition. These same motors are also used in cranes, wheel loaders and general construction equipment. Though not a new product, the designs of such motors and control valves have been around a few decades, the overall method for manufacture has changed rapidly over the last few years to take account of the need for more modular designs, manufacture and just-in-time manufacturing. Kawasaki Precision Machinery (UK) Ltd based in Plymouth, UK is one of the leading manufacturers of such motors and pumps. They approached Industrial Vision Systems Ltd to come up with a solution to provide automated inspection of such pumps for their semi-automated assembly process. The pumps requiring inspection are at a sub-assembly stage when they are due for the inspection process to take place. Due to the highly modular nature of the construction each part of the pump can have many different derivatives which overall have a different effect on the pump in industrial use. It is therefore critical for the manufacturing process to check all components are the correct type and number for the construction of the pump to begin. Once built it is difficult and costly to rework such units if a fault is detected later in the manufacturing process, therefore automated visual inspection is critical for the success in building quality motors and pumps.

Best Buy wanted to quickly develop and deploy apps to achieve business goals. Also, create apps that are scalable and low-maintenance.

The Home Depot, the world's largest home improvement retailer, was facing a significant challenge in enhancing the performance and scalability of its IT infrastructure while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO). The company's traditional approach of upgrading to faster servers and more efficient storage was no longer sufficient. The Home Depot needed a more innovative solution to reduce TCO and improve operational efficiency for its vast retail store and e-commerce business. The company was also looking for a way to consolidate its server, storage, and virtualization teams into a single operations group to optimize and manage the entire infrastructure stack from a single console. The challenge was to find a solution that would allow them to achieve these goals while also enabling them to quickly deploy new applications to internal users and customers.

Minimise the risk of an interruption to global operations, and better support the efforts of end users without adding complexity or increasing management burden.

To ensure safe operation of the nuclear plant, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations sets the performance objectives and defines the criteria (PO&C) to meet those objectives. The plant personnel manually compare each line item in the CAP report against the PO&C to evaluate the seriousness of the event. A spilled cup of coffee in the wrong place might not be too serious, while a critical pump leaking that has the potential to shut down the plant is another matter entirely. This manual process of classifying the seriousness of each item in a CAP report lies at the heart of the continuous effort to improve the safety and operation of the nuclear power plant, but requires significant time and resources. Our client needed a way to automate the classification process to increase its efficiency and to extract information from years of reported events to better understand their causes and anticipate possible adverse events.

A large U.S. heavy equipment manufacturer and logistics company sell its vehicles to dealers who, in turn, rent or sell them to individual customers. An antiquated, on-premises data center made maintaining and managing its 400,000 pieces of heavy equipment a challenge.This outdated environment also made it difficult to scale its vehicle monitoring capabilities, assess vehicle health proactively and capture analytics for insights into performance across the company. With its legacy data center at capacity and the high licensing fees associated with available marketplace solutions, the manufacturer needed a partner to help transform its business operations.

Increasingly sophisticated malware attacks can leave healthcare providers in a vulnerable position as they confront the critical need to improve security while also keeping IT costs under control. Concord Hospital has worked hard to cultivate a reputation for clinical and patient service excellence.As an example of its progressive approach to automating health service delivery, Hospitals & Health Networks magazine has named Concord one of the United States’ “Most Wired Hospitals” for several consecutive years. In order to maintain this level of operational excellence, Concord Hospital needed a solution to save time and resources while also improving results for software licensing, patch management, asset inventory and security configuration.

Virtustream has deep SAP expertise, helping enterprises take advantage of cloud economics with its xStream-powered infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings. Virtustream specializes in cloud and hosting services for SAP, with nearly 500 SAP HANA instance migrations to date. It was the first service provider to offer SAP and SAP HANA in a multitenant cloud. To meet the security, compliance, performance, and efficiency requirements of complex production applications in the cloud, Virtustream selected the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) and Cisco® networking technology for its data centers.

Built on the principles of excellence, quality and integrity, the company strives to provide superior service to their customers, and with tens of thousands of devices out in the field, CTS needed a solution to effectively control and manage all devices from a central command center. In other words, they needed a single way to activate and deactivate devices, manage rate plan changes and diagnose problems.

Devicify required a means to quickly build "connected IoT apps” without building a connected applications platform themselves, an expensive and time consuming option.There is a need for Devicify's Connected Products Management (CPM) product to create agile development environments for both technical and business users within a given company. Johnson notes that speeding up the software development process is critical, but the larger value is in combining this with agility in adapting processes that support new business services. Johnson suggests that the resulting new strategic differentiators are what will drive business transformation within the IoT space.Business users and customers stand to gain tremendously from the effective use of Devicify CPM because the technical users are able to easily and quickly develop the software needed to create full end to end solutions. Devicify specifically engaged with ThingWorx so that these technical users could easily connect the edge devices and end points established by the connected products themselves to the business processes and applications they fed into to create the innovative business services that ultimately serve as strategic business differentiators.

Fast food chains like McDonald's seek to manage labor and energy costs along multiple nodes of their supply chain. One place where all the challenges of running these restaurants converge is the kitchen. In fact, the kitchen is the ideal place where energy can be saved, monitored and improved. The toughest part about effecting changes in the kitchen though is the fact that these buildings are often old and difficult to upgrade.

Every year, spring rains and snowmelt pour into the rivers and reservoirs that feed the City of Calgary’s water supply. As a result, downtown businesses and residents are faced with unpredictable floods that could do millions of dollars of damage. The City of Calgary turned to the PI System for a data-driven approach to predicting and managing flooding.Both the Bow and Elbow rivers flow through Calgary’s borders and provide fresh water to the system. These rivers carry the runoff, rainfall, and snowmelt from nearly 9,000 kilometers of land and the water is collected in two primary reservoirs managed by the City of Calgary. To ensure a safe, consistent, supply of water for its customers, the City of Calgary must keep a close eye on both the quality and quantity of water in these rivers and reservoirs. One of the biggest challenges in doing so is the region’s annual floods. Each year, between May and June, snowmelt, runoff, and rainstorms cause the water levels in the rivers to increase substantially. Preparing for flood-level waters is part of the utility’s annual plans, but predicting when, precisely, they would occur was another matter. Water tables can change quickly and the utility must balance flood risks against continuing to meet user demand and maintaining reservoir levels and water quality. During a flood event, the utility is faced with a surge in water volume through its system. Before water reaches the reservoirs, it must be treated and the sudden increase in volume caused by the floods often overwhelmed the treatment plants, resulting in quality issues. Furthermore, City of Calgary lacked timely information that would let it reduce reservoir volume in advance of a flood. As a result, emergency response often struggled to respond as flood waters reached downtown. The resulting damages — including residential and commercial insurance claims, water quality issues, system downtime, and regulatory fines — could total in the millions. To reduce the impact of floods on its customers and its business, City of Calgary, turned to the PI System.

Monaco’s sanitation department uses alarm software to monitor its water treatment facilities. With connections to the waste water networks, the main lifting stations, three storm overflows, a storm tank, as well as waste water pre-treatment and final treatment operations, the department can rest assured that they know exactly what is – and what is not – being put back into the ocean on a regular basis.

Since maintaining the confidentiality of human genetic data is of paramount importance to GenoSpace, the company has made security a top priority. In an environment where breaches involving healthcare data have reached alarming levels, GenoSpace understands the costly business impact of noncompliance with HIPAA patient privacy regulations and industry-leading data security practices. For example, the Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2014 annual list of security breaches points out that the medical/healthcare sector accounted for more than 42.5% of all the breaches listed, topping all other categories. Since reporting requirements began, the US Department of Health and Human Services has tracked 944 incidents involving approximately 30 million individuals. Along with the persistence and enormity of this problem comes financial fallout. For example, in its study, 2014 Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis, the Ponemon Institute estimated that the average cost of a data breach in 2014 was $3.5 million, an increase of 15% over 2013. Additionally, the average cost per record across all sectors also increased, from $188 to $201—and the per capita cost for healthcare was the highest across all industries at $316 per patient. And the typical fine for a data breach runs up to $1.5 million per incident. The cost of breaches to the healthcare sector overall is estimated at $5.6 billion annually.

If the embedded developer is using an Intel Quark or the next generation smaller class product to power an IoT device, one of the biggest problems they face today is which IoT communication protocol to adopt. Dozens of new wired and wireless schema are competing to own the network, data and physical layers. Several consortia have emerged to describe new reference architectures for communicating between IoT devices and clouds. And there are many solid legacy protocols with strong track records. From the developer’s perspective, it may feel like the risk is so high of choosing the wrong protocol that it might as well be a no-fly zone.

The UC Santa Cruz campus building were costly to keep illuminated at current levels. Daintree Networks attempted to reduce costs by retrofitting the entire campus building, and address limitations in the existing infrastructure. For example, as part of the retrofit, the team also considered the illumination levels and found that the levels were significantly higher than industry recommendations, a situation all too common in campus buildings.

No project is like another in the field of engineered solutions for escape and rescue chambers and fire simulation. Systems are tailored exactly to customers' requirements.