Level: USE CASES
In this penultimate article for our 2021 Advent Calendar, we’re switching away from the technical hints and tips, to look more at some use-cases. Our stated purpose at Software AG is “We connect people and technology for a smarter tomorrow”.
One of the rewarding aspects of working at Software AG on a product like Apama is seeing some of the multitudes of different ways that you, our customers, are using the technology we produce. Over the past two decades, those use-cases have varied enormously. However, even though we’ve been doing some of these for decades, some of the most humbling moments are when we get to see those where we help to make an impact on shaping a better future for humanity on planet earth. What I’m talking about here are those projects that touch on environmental aspects, energy savings, and conserving natural resources.
The first use-case we’ll talk about is initially considered to be in the domain of quality control in the manufacturing industry. However, when the product you are manufacturing is enough high-quality copper wire each day to stretch from our planet to Venus, you can imagine that not only are quality issues commercially costly, but they were also environmentally costly in terms of the amount of wasted electricity from a bad batch and reprocessing. Realtime streaming analytics with Apama allows the manufacturer to continuously monitor at 25mm intervals instead of checking 100-meter sections, meaning they can react to a drop in quality immediately. Read about Schwering & Hasse.
How about monitoring green electricity generation on a much larger scale? Apama is again used here within Cumulocity IoT in a dedicated deployment to monitor the activity through real-time data streams of wind turbines at some of the largest wind farms around the world, helping to ensure the smooth running of these critical pieces of global infrastructure as we transition to green energy production. Read more at Nordex Group Adopts Cumulocity IoT to Manage Clean-Energy Wind Farms (softwareag.cloud). We have other customers of Cumulocity IoT who also run wind farms, and even solar parks. Fun fact - some of the code mentioned on Day #17 in relation to Cloud Fieldbus was developed for the solar park project.
As we look to the future, the way that we seamlessly monitor, predict and control the built environment in which we live will be another way of conserving our precious energy and natural resources, often as part of broader Smart City initiatives. One obvious and well-known domain for Industrial IoT is the area of automated building management solutions, again often for the purposes of reduced energy use, for example by better control of HVAC. There have been numerous examples for solutions based on Cumulocity IoT, such as this one at BSA in Australia (pdf). You can also read more about our IoT Building Automation (IoT BAS) | Building Automation Software (softwareag.com).
As mentioned, it is not just about energy though - it’s also about the preservation of other scarce resources… such as water. Every year, 126 billion+ cubic meters of water are lost due to leaks, poor metering, and tampering. Using Cumulocity IoT, and Apama Streaming Analytics, we have an IoT Solution Accelerator for Water Management that helps to reduce that waste. Read more about some of our partners on that journey: Nucleus 3, Telstra.
We hope you find these examples as inspiring as we do, and maybe it will trigger you to investigate using Apama Streaming Analytics in new use-cases of your own that help to shape a better and smarter tomorrow for all of us.
Speaking of ‘tomorrow’, we hope to have a light-hearted, fun, festive treat for you in our final article…
This is Day #23 of a short series of brief tips, tricks, hints, and reminders of information relating to the Apama Streaming Analytics platform, both from Software AG as well as from the community.
This series of articles will be published Monday-Friday only, with the occasional weekend bonus.