Linz Center of Mechatronics (LCM) specialises in integrating multiple technologies into one cohesive solution, comprising the latest in mechatronics, automation, digital product development and artificial intelligence.
LCM contacted ELEKS seeking a strategic partner experienced in Microsoft Azure services that could help it to understand the capabilities of the cloud, then implement cloud-based fleet management and data flow management services within its industrial IoT solution. As a first step, LCM needed to create a test environment to showcase the benefits of cloud.
To begin with, ELEKS’ experts conducted a comprehensive workshop to determine if it was possible to execute LCM’s hardware and data management services – currently hosted in local and edge apps – in the cloud. During the workshop, we analysed and presented our vision for the following solution layers:
- Data layer: the potential to manage and analyse LCM’s Big Data in the cloud using Azure Data Explorer.
- Hardware layer: the possibility of maintaining and managing the hardware on edge, as well as moving the workload containing the interaction between the hardware and the database to the cloud (Azure Arc with Kubernetes cluster)
- Visualisation and reporting layer: using data in the cloud for visualisation and reporting via Grafana (queries, predictions, dashboards, real-time status and connectivity of hardware, etc.)
Afterwards, ELEKS’ R&D team conducted a feasibility study to define the future architecture vision and implementation plan of a solution that would meet LCM’s technical and business requirements.
During the feasibility study, we defined eight hypotheses covering fleet management, cloud services integration, configuration hosting, advanced access control and more. Our team then worked to validate these hypotheses, understand any limitations and define which of them were relevant to the proposed solution.
We provided LCM with a development and testing environment in the cloud, which comprised cloud-based infrastructure, deployed fleet management service, IoT data acquisition telemetry from the edge to the cloud, and a Grafana visualisation web app.
Concluding the feasibility study, we conducted a knowledge-transfer workshop and demo.
ELEKS’ expertise not only facilitated the smooth ingestion of data in LCM’ development projects, but also provided the company with the necessary knowledge to support its customers seamlessly from data acquisition to value generation. LCM received a demo environment that it plans to deploy internally in its cloud, which it can showcase to existing and potential clients.
Both LCM and ELEKS will now focus on building a trusted and transparent partnership that will allow them to jointly implement manufacturing IoT solutions in the cloud, with LCM focusing on the hardware components and ELEKS acting as an advisor for the Microsoft Azure services connected to the initiative.
