Abstract:
The problem of developing a digital monitoring system for efficient analysis of industrial
processes has been considered. According to a recent study, Pakistan based industries
have very high energy losses as compare to global energy losses. Such industry specific
losses and other management related issues can be addressed with digital monitoring
platforms. They have applications in agriculture, healthcare, aerospace, defense, and
manufacturing. There are different types of digital monitoring systems and involve
multiple software and hardware to achieve the required functionalities. In general, we
can classify a digital monitoring system in three parts: front-end applications, back-
end applications and processor/communication part. The front-end application include
web and mobile-based applications that provide the required data in a user friendly
format and allow human interaction with the digital platform. Back-end applications
include sensors/models and actuators that are connected to the distributed components
of industrial process that is being managed. Processors and Communication include
the WiFi-based hardware for receiving, processing, and sending the remote data from
the field instrumentation devices to database. The main objective of this work is to
explore different software and hardware based components according to user require-
ments and suggest an integrated framework. We developed a digital monitoring system
that integrate sensors and MATLAB based models to ESP32 processor and display the
processed data on web and android based devices. The frontend applications have been
designed to support real time sensor data and computational data along with storage
of the data in a database. The complete monitoring system with the designed web and
android applications is implemented on a case study of analyzing energy utilization of
steel manufacturing process.
