A new simple, flexible and low-cost machine monitoring system

Abstract

The industry 4.0 revolution provides the machines with a sensory and communicational capacity, which allows them to monitor and collect large amounts of information. This kind of data have an impact on planning, maintenance, and management of production, enabling real time reaction, efficiency increase, and the development of predictive and process improvement models. The most recent machines are prepared to communicate with the existing monitoring systems, however, many (around 60%) do not. The objective of this work is to present the proposal of a system for remote monitoring of equipment in real time that meets the requirements of low cost, simplicity, and flexibility. The system monitors the equipment in a simple and agile way, regardless of its sophistication, installation constraints and company resources. A prototype of a system was developed and tested both laboratory conditions and a productive environment. The proposed architecture of the system comprises of a sensor that transmits the machine’s signal wirelessly to a gateway which is responsible of collecting all surrounding signals and send it to the cloud. During the testing and assessment of the tools, the results validated the developed prototype. As main result, the proposed solution offers to the industrial market a new low-cost monitoring system based in mature and tested technology laid upon flexible and scalable solutions.