Development of a IIoT Platform for Industrial Imaging Sensors

In the industry, connecting machines and tools - also known as the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) - is an essential part of the digital transformation of a company. The aim is to increase the efficiency and predictability of complex processes. In manual and semi-automatic processes, imaging sensors can help to monitor conditions, gives automated feedbacks to a central system, and e.g. provide current information for a digital twin. However, when imaging sensors are integrated into established IIoT platforms, they quickly reach their system limits due to the multidimensionality and high update and data rates. This paper presents a software platform that enables decoupled automated image processing through the abstraction and contextualization of the sensor technology and its data as well as a plugin architecture. Analogous to edge computing, partial processing can already be performed close to the sensor node to condensate data and reduce network loads and latencies. Thereby, all these approaches increase the longevity, flexibility and scalability of multi-sensor systems and associated processing algorithms. Based on the generic structure of the sensor network, the user is provided with an intuitive user interface that is based on IIoT platforms and enables the integration of their processing pipelines even for non-experts, despite the high complexity of the data.