Home > Edge > Manufacturing Edge > Guides > Dell Validated Design for Manufacturing Edge - Design Guide with 5 Independent Software Vendors > Cross-ISV use cases
In this use case, the integration between the Telit deviceWISE Asset Gateway and the XMPro platform is demonstrated to ingest the telemetry data from OT assets to digital twin using OPC UA protocol.
This step-by-step configuration is meant to be an introduction to using the XMPro platform and its interface with the Telit deviceWISE Asset Gateway. This use case also explains how to create and design a Data Stream, configure Stream Objects to ingest, and to analyze, transform, and perform actions on data. Also, this explains how to set up a Recommendation to generate alerts based on rule logic, how to create and design Apps, Data Sources, and Connections, and how to configure a simple Data Grid and Chart.
The Telit deviceWISE Asset Gateway is installed on a Dell Edge Gateway along with XMPro Stream Host, and they are deployed on-premise with connections to an enterprise's existing network.
The gateway collects data from devices and sensors and forwards it to the XMPro Stream Host using the OPC UA protocol. Data is collected from devices at level 0/1 at the far edge, to be processed at the near edge on XMPro’s digital twin platform in a VM.
The following are the software and hardware components, protocols, and application stacks that are part of this use case.
Component | Description |
Telit Cinterion: deviceWISE Workbench | Workbench is a client to the deviceWISE service. Workbench allows connection to devices and creation of edge logic using drag and drop triggers. It is used to configure the Asset Gateways and the Enterprise Gateways (referred to as nodes). It provides functionalities to develop, administer, and debug devices in the field. |
Telit Cinterion: deviceWISE Asset Gateway | The deviceWISE Asset Gateway is the software that communicates with a company's assets, processes any data, and sends the processed data to an application using the OPC UA protocol. |
XMPro: Stream Host Server | A Stream Host is an application that can either be installed as a Windows service or as a console application. Stream Hosts enable data streams to run and execute actions. |
XMPro: Application Designer (AD) | Application Designer provides resources for the runtime user visualization application to run on. It also runs the Recommendation and Alerts engine. |
XMPro: Subscription Manager (SM) | Subscription Manager provides resources for the security application, which manages features such as user, access, and role management. |
XMPro: Data Stream Designer (DS) | Data Stream Designer provides resources for the engineering application that is used to build and edit Data Streams. |
XMPro: SQL Server Database (combined for SM, AD, and DS) | SQL Server Database provides resources to host the Application Designer, Data Stream Designer, and the Subscription Manager databases. |
Dell EMC Edge Gateway 3200 or 5200 | The EGW-3200 and EGW-5200 are ruggedized gateways that are built to handle harsh environments, and they provide performance at the edge and can handle sizeable workloads. |
OPC UA | OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a cross-platform, open-source, IEC62541 standard for data exchange from sensors to cloud applications that was developed by the OPC Foundation. |
This use case assumes that the platform with Telit deviceWISE Asset Gateway and XMPro is installed and configured.
Let us assume that there is a power plant that uses a heat exchanger to keep a turbine running at an optimum temperature. The heat exchanger circulates water between the cooling tower and the heat exchanger to dissipate heat. To keep a proper circulation of liquid, there are three pumps [A, B, and C] installed. Each pump has a sensor that provides live data for flow rate (in liters per minute, or L/m) and temperature (in °C). This live data is collected at the deviceWISE Asset Gateway.
Unless the pump is under maintenance, the flow rate should be above 15000 L/m and the water temperature should be below 130°C.
Engineers should be alerted if the average flow rate falls below 250 L/s. If the average temperature rises above 130°C, then a critical level alert should be raised.
Engineers should be provided with a view to check the history of pump telemetry, maintenance records, and the reservoir level to enable them to take necessary action.
The use case requires that engineers should be alerted if the flow rate, averaged over 5 seconds, falls below 250 L/s. Also, if the temperature, averaged over 5 seconds, rises above 130°C, then a critical level alert should be raised. To achieve this, use Recommendations in the App Designer.
The use case requires that the engineers are provided a view to check the history of pump telemetry, maintenance records, and reservoir level to enable them to take necessary action. This requirement can be met using an App with a couple of Pages.
The base Template of the App Designer is the Blank App. The Blank App creates an application with one Landing Page, and it provides choices for Page Layout, similar to creating a new Page. Other templates can be designed and saved by users, using the page layouts that the Application had when it was saved as a template.
AI and machine learning agents allow you to run advanced AI to transform the data. For example, Azure ML, IBM Watson, and Jupyter Notebook.
Functions perform specific mathematical or statistical operations on data. For example, the FFT function performs forward FFT calculations on the data that it receives.
Recommendations enable employees of an organization to respond to critical events, based on expert knowledge in the organization, before the opportunity expires. Managers can monitor these responses to ensure that they are done in a timely and appropriate manner.
Recommendation Alerts are advanced alerts that are triggered when a critical event occurs. Alerts are created when real-time data meets the conditions of recommendation rules. Alerts are then discovered by employees through email, SMS notifications, or the monitoring of systems.
Feedback mechanisms are provided within the XMPro platform which enable the continuous improvement of the asset performance or process optimization.
Recommendation Alerts are triggered when real-time data meets the criteria defined in a Recommendation Rule. They notify you when certain conditions occur and provide decision support for how to take action.
An Action Request is a mechanism to trigger actions in another system while attending to an Alert, such as updating data, sending notifications, or additional processing.
Social and Communication Agents, such as Email and Twilio, allow you to read and send emails in your data streams. These are used to integrate business processes into email communications.
Action agents enable you to publish the data stream results to an OT platform, Application event boards, or the enterprise databases.
There are various use cases for anomaly detection which can be realized with XMPro’s Digital Twin Platform. XMPro-based Digital Twin aggregates the telemetry data and generates recommendations, based on data streams and agents, for the specific components.
A few examples are as follows:
Always start small. Digital transformation is achieved by many small projects that deliver success at each step. The overall goal is to achieve project success early and expand.
There are many challenges to achieve success. By starting with small projects, you lower the overall risk of failure. The positive side of small projects is that failures are realized quickly and the costs are limited.
There are many considerations and best practices to follow for solutions using the XMPro platform. It is recommended to follow the solution development process, which is outlined as follows:
Telit deviceWISE Asset Gateways located on plant floor bring OT floor data into convergence platforms, which brings possibilities to analyze and simplify data into information that is accessible by everyone. Ingesting the informative data into an XMPro digital twin platform is seamless using the OPC UA industrial protocol. The informative data is processed to virtualize the real plant on XMPro platform.
XMPro empowers business users to create and deploy applications to detect and respond to critical events in real time, without having data stuck in multiple systems. With XMPro’s event intelligence platform, subject matter experts can easily create complex real-time applications that provide situational awareness, are always on, and prescribe and orchestrate appropriate actions.
The Dell Validated Design for Manufacturing Edge provides innovative integrations that bring machine vision analytics recommendations by Cognex to XMPro for real-time and historical analysis. This process generates recommendations for continuous improvement and process optimization.
A machine vision-based digital twin offering leverages image and associated metadata that is generated from Cognex Vision Pro and Deep Learning applications. Such images and metadata are streamed into the Dell Streaming Data Platform (SDP) for persistence. Ingested data is also automatically indexed for efficient search on demand. Pravega search resident on SDP allows REST API-based searches for customized queries based on specific criteria. An XMPro REST agent, running within a Data Stream, queries SDP for machine vision data and presents the results on the user-defined XMPro Application Dashboard and provides inputs to the user-defined XMPro Recommendations. The XMPro dashboard can also display the image and associated metadata on the dashboard for effective anomaly detection and for verifying the recommendations. By leveraging real-time and historical data-based digital twins, customers can improve manufacturing operations, use actionable insights to make changes to the process, and realize the benefits.
The following are the considerations for system design to ensure effective data ingest and retrieval between Cognex and the XMPro application using SDP as the persistence store.
The ability to ingest and contextualize both machine vision and telemetry data in a digital twin system presents interesting possibilities. Rather than the two data categories residing in siloed systems, value can now be derived from examining the two data types together within XMPro, to deliver previously unavailable recommendations and insights.
As an example, using the case of a Bottling Plant, bottle cap anomalies (e.g. caps missing, cap misalignment) tend to increase as the speed of the bottle conveyor line increases. An XMPro Recommendation rule can be generated to monitor both the rate of cap anomalies (aggregation of machine vision metadata) and the conveyor line speed (telemetry data from deviceWISE). Should both measured values exceed a given threshold, then a Recommendation could be generated to instruct operations to lower the conveyor line speed or indeed execute an automatic action to adjust the speed setpoint.
XMPro interfaces directly with the Dell Streaming Data Platform (SDP) to retrieve images and associated metadata for later display and processing.
The primary XMPro components that are used are the:
Now that the Stream Host is successfully deployed, build the Data Stream required to query the Dell Streaming Data Platform for any new Cognex generated images (and associated metadata) by performing the following steps.
The capability of XMPro to ingest machine vision data from Cognex (using the Dell Streaming Data Platform) enables industry use cases that previously could not be easily realized.
Also, the merging of machine vision data with data from other business systems, within XMPro, enriches the user experience by providing operators with all the data they need, both visual and textual, to manage the plant floor operations from a single application.
CTD functions by observing what happens on the network and learning from the data that it ingests. This is done either through passive means, like network traffic mirroring, or through active means like specifying a query to a specific device. Using these methods, CTD learns about the assets on the network and analyzes the data to provide information for what it learns to be normal behavior, potential risks, threats, or vulnerabilities.
Interoperability between CTD and any of the ISVs in this solution have a common theme, to capture communications and understand what normal behavior is between the various ISV components. Also, CTD finds and presents any potential threats, risks, or vulnerability that could be presented as part of the ISV deployment or as part of its communication between other components on the network.
The integration steps are outlined in the following sections and can apply to any ISV component and various protocols that are run over the network.
Once CTD successfully ingests the mirrored network traffic between the ISV components, users are able to see information on the ISV within CTD. There are two primary examples for this, assets and baselines. The first step is to confirm that CTD can identify the assets in the network communication flows and create entries for each of the assets. This can be confirmed in CTD by navigating to Visibility > Assets.
CTD can be thought of as an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), where it passively listens to network traffic and produces alerts based on any potential threats seen on the network. CTD allows for integration with firewalls on the network to push its data to the firewall, and this data can be used to create firewall rules on the network. Users can then accept the CTD rules on the firewall, which helps actively prevent violations of the rules created within CTD. More information about this function can be found in Integrate Palo Alto firewall.
SRA provides a more secure solution for remote management in industrial networks. SRA provides various features, such as granular access controls, that allow for strict control of who can access what remote endpoint, at what time, and for how long. SRA provides additional capabilities like session recordings and session monitoring to help make sure current and past remote session activities are not being misused.
Interoperability between SRA and any of the ISVs in this solution have a common theme, to provide secure remote access management to the ISV hosts. SRA provides support for multiple protocols for remote management such as SSH, RDP, and web interface access. The combination of these protocols allows for remote management of the different ISV solutions and components.
The following examples outline the different types of remote sessions that can be created, which can then be used with an ISV in this solution.
Steps for creating remote sessions and other functionality can be referenced in SRA remote session control. Use these steps as guidance to create the appropriate sessions and to use other important features of SRA.
XMPro can be managed either through the host Windows operating system or through its web interface. SRA can support remote connectivity to both. For the XMPro Windows host, users can create an RDP session. If a user needs to manage XMPro from its web interface, for example if a remote user needs to add a new Data Stream, then an SRA session can be created specifically for the XMPro web interface.
Cognex tools are run and managed on a Windows operating system. Creating an RDP session from SRA to the Cognex host or hosts supports the management of the tools and host operating system for Cognex. Avoid using shared accounts in both SRA and when the user RDPs to the Windows operating system.
Telit deviceWISE components can be hosted on various operating systems. The primary examples are Windows or Linux-based systems, for which SRA can support connectivity to both. For Windows deployments, users can leverage RDP connections to manage deviceWISE components. Linux supports RDP packages which allow RDP connections, or users can leverage VNC, as SRA supports this a well. Finally, SRA can also support SSH connections if required.
Litmus runs its own operating system, so access is likely to be kept to the Litmus web interface. Users on SRA can create a remote session to specified websites. This allows users to remote into the OT environment and only be allowed to access the Litmus web UI as needed. Litmus Edge Manager provides access to the OS using SSH, or it can be managed using a web interface such as Litmus Edge.
SDP hosted on Linux environments can be managed through SSH access (this gives users the ability to, for example, run Kubernetes administration commands). For SDP UI or Keycloak management, users can create a web access session which limits them to only access a web browser to manage SDP.
In this use case, the integration between Litmus Edge and the XMPro platform is demonstrated to ingest the telemetry data from OT assets to digital twin using OPC UA protocol.
This step-by-step configuration is meant to be an introduction to using the XMPro platform and its interface with Litmus Edge. This use case further explains how to create and design a Data Stream, as well as how to configure Stream Objects to ingest.
Litmus Edge is installed on Dell PowerEdge or VxRail, along with XMPro Stream Host, and then deployed on-premise and connected to an enterprise's existing network.
The following software and hardware components, protocols, and application stacks are part of this use case.
Component | Description |
Litmus Edge | Litmus Edge (LE) is the industrial edge computing platform that allows operators to collect, analyze, and act on real-time data at the edge. LE provides out-of-the-box support for any PLC, CNC, sensor, or robotic system, allowing operators to rapidly connect devices. Operators can share normalized data between any edge, big data, cloud, or enterprise system. Litmus Edge deploys an extensive variety of devices in an industrial environment using native drivers. |
XMPro: Stream Host Server | A Stream Host is an application that can either be installed as a Windows Service or as a Console Application. Stream Hosts enable Data Streams to run and execute actions. |
XMPro: Application Designer (AD) | Provides resources for the runtime user visualization application to run on. Also runs the Recommendation/Alerts engine. |
XMPro: Subscription Manager (SM) | Provides resources for the security application which manages features such as user, access, and role management. |
XMPro: Data Stream Designer (DS) | Provides resources for the engineering application used to build and edit Data Streams. |
XMPro: SQL Server Database (combined for SM, AD, and DS) | Provides resources to host the Application Designer, Data Stream Designer, and the Subscription Manager databases. |
Dell Edge Gateway, VxRail, and PowerEdge servers | The class, storage, and memory capacity combinations of Dell VxRail and PowerEdge servers vary depending on the workload classification and application consolidation needs within a small to large customer manufacturing environment. |
OPC UA | OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a cross-platform, open-source, IEC62541 standard for data exchange from sensors to cloud applications. It was developed by the OPC Foundation. |
Host: Enter the OPC UA host IP address.
Port: Enter the port number 4840.