Applied Technology Review : News

While GPS remains an important tool for outdoor navigation, it requires the receiver to have an unobstructed line of sight to satellites. The satellite-based GPS signal loses significant power indoors due to signal weakening caused by building construction materials. As a result, all mobile location-based apps, such as navigation, cannot function inside airports, malls, subways, and so on. Furthermore, GPS cannot provide information about the user's current floor and building level. These factors pose a bigger challenge for the next generation of location-based services applications, emphasizing the requirement for a system that can accurately and precisely locate a user inside a building, making positioning and navigation inside as simple as outside. So, How Exactly Does the Indoor Positioning System Function? An Indoor Positioning System (IPS) depends on nearby anchors (nodes with known positions) rather than satellites to either actively locate tags or provide environmental context for devices to sense. IPS can be local to one's smartphone (or another portable navigation device) and passively create a location fix. The Ascension of the Beacon Unlike GPS, there is no standard method for developing an indoor positioning system. However, the list of supporting/evolving technologies is as follows. Although Wi-Fi received signal strength (RSS) and RFID systems are becoming more popular, they cannot achieve the sub-meter accuracy required for many indoor WSN applications such as personnel tracking in crowded airports. Due to this, companies are turning to beacons for high-precision indoor localization. Beacons are Bluetooth low energy (BLE) tracking tags sent out by sensors. These sensors can be placed throughout a venue, and a mobile device can detect the BLE signal and determine its proximity. When this technology is used to build a mobile app, it can be used in novel ways to interact with the end-user, such as notifying a customer of a promotion for an item they are close to purchasing. Beacons are low-cost and simple to deploy, and they can provide a granular, proximity-based indoor location for a better guest experience. This allows businesses to communicate with their customers based on their precise location, and when combined with other indoor navigation technologies, it can provide extremely accurate tracking. Beacons can also be used in airline cargo to track inventory in real-time as it enters and exits the warehouse. The system can automatically notify relevant staff when there is a shortage or surplus of inventory in a given area and collect logistics data. Inventory visibility aids in reducing unnecessary losses caused by product unavailability. ...Read more

SCADA is paving its way into all industries, including the energy industry, which is heavily adopting it. An enterprise SCADA system collects data from all of a portfolio's solar photovoltaic (PV) plants and consolidates it into a single platform. This is in contrast to a site-level SCADA system, which collects data from individual solar photovoltaic (PV) plants.An enterprise SCADA system enables plant operators and owners to view all activity across their portfolio in a centralized location. Owners can quickly assess the performance of their whole fleet. Operators can concentrate on the portfolio as a whole rather than having to solve difficulties on each site platform. Monitoring and controlling a large number of sites becomes significantly easier when using an enterprise SCADA system. To collect data from a remote solar photovoltaic (PV) plant, the enterprise SCADA system must establish a connection to the site-level SCADA system for the plant. Typically, this is accomplished through the use of one of three protocols—OPC-UA, DNP3, or Modbus TCP/IP. The most widely used interoperability protocol is OPC-UA, which is designed for safe LAN to WAN connections. It supports the usage of a security certificate and includes additional useful features like as timestamps and the ability to verify the quality of data. On the hardware side, an enterprise SCADA program requires a server or platform to run on. This can be a server located in the operations center or a cloud-based service. Additionally, firewalls must be in place at the enterprise level and at each location. Firewalls establish a secure site-to-site connection over a VPN tunnel and filter out malicious Web traffic and threats. There are various enterprise SCADA software platforms available. SCADA software like as Ignition and GE CIMPLICITY are frequently utilized since they conveniently support the OPC-UA protocol. Network security is critical for the protection of the energy infrastructure. Remote site connections to an enterprise SCADA system must be configured in such a way that their susceptibility is minimized. NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) establishes standards for secure network traffic delivery between power facilities. These guidelines should be followed by the IT department responsible for system configuration. ...Read more

Digital twins are virtual representations of actual devices that data scientists and IT professionals can use to run simulations before building and deploying genuine devices. FREMONT CA: Beyond manufacturing, digital twin technology has advanced into the convergent worlds of the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. As increasingly complicated "things" become connected and capable of producing data, having a digital equivalent enables data scientists and other IT experts to optimize deployments for maximum efficiency and simulate alternative scenarios. A digital twin represents a physical thing or system in a digital format. Digital twin technology has developed to incorporate buildings, factories, and even cities, and some have argued that even individuals and processes can have digital twins, further broadening the concept. A digital twin is computer software that accepts real-world data about a physical thing or system as input and delivers predictions or simulations of how those inputs will influence that physical object or strategy as output. A digital twin is created by specialists who are frequently experts in data science or applied mathematics. These developers study the physics behind the physical thing or system being emulated and use that information to create a mathematical model that replicates the physical object or system in digital space. The twin is created so that it can receive data from sensors attached to a physical counterpart. This enables the twin to imitate the physical thing in real-time, providing information about its performance and potential for failure. The twin could also be based on a prototype of its physical counterpart, in which case it can provide input as the product is polished; in fact, the twin could serve as a prototype in and of itself before the physical counterpart is constructed. The method is detailed in this post by Eniram, a business that makes digital twins for the giant container ships that transport the majority of the world's commerce—a particularly sophisticated type of digital twin application. However, a digital twin can be as complex or essential as desired. The amount of data used to create and update it determines the degree of precision you can simulate a physical thing. For instance, this lesson demonstrates how to create a rudimentary digital twin of an automobile by computing mileage using only a few input variables. ...Read more