Design and Development of Real-Time IIoT for Multi-cloud Factory Vehicle Monitoring System

Material handling equipment, such as forklifts, is broadly used in many industries to increase the efficiency of production. However, if the equipment unexpectedly breaks down, then that can potentially interrupt the overall manufacturing. Therefore, it is beneficial to the industry if the equipment usage data can be monitored in real time so that responsible engineers can identify faults before they occur. In this research, a prototype for a factory vehicle monitoring system has been designed and implemented. The proposed solution is to acquire real-time usage data from the motor drive of the factory vehicle and send the data to the cloud via narrowband IoT which is a low-power wide area network. The received real-time data streams can be visualized on the monitoring website to observe the status of the vehicles. The solution is attained with multiple clouds appropriately chosen according to their offering services, which include telecommunication cloud, public cloud and on-premise cloud. The experiment has been performed to verify that the monitored data can explain actual data during the actual operation within an actual factory environment. Additionally, the example of a monitoring website is given to present the utility of the website to monitor the status of the vehicles.