Solution Architecting to Reduce Cost.
Vikan Chirawatpongsa
Industrial 4.0 Solution Architect | IIoT Specialist | Unified Namespace Advocate | SCADA/MES Professional | Tulip/Igniton/N3uron | "Transforming Manufacturing Through Technology"
Appomax rarely loses a bid to a direct competitor. Most of the time the most significant obstacle, here in Thailand, are the customers' budget. So it's no surprise when we designed a Centralised Solar Monitoring solution for a customer and was flatly told that, "It's beyond our budget"
The customer is a company that builds solar roofs and solar farms. They operate some to sell electricity to manufacturers and industrial estates or sell them off to make a profit.
The customer wishes to do a Proof of Concept with 8 sites with various sizes ranging from 0.52MW to 18MW and a total of 243 Inverters; so a mixture of size S, M, and L.
The monitoring solution requires
Here is what we designed
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It seems like a perfect solution that meets all the requirements... except the cost.
I envy SI in places where the customers are fine with the Ignition's price tag, but I am in Thailand and used to seeing the customers' reaction when I show them the price.
So... do we give up? Of course not. We then swap out components and re-engineer a lower-cost solution.
Here is what we came up with
For Reporting, we decided to use Nuron's Scripting module to call the API Server, get the aggregated Historian Data, pre-calculate the values, and store all the processed data in an SQL Database.
We can use a BI tool like Amazon Quicksight to generate the report; depending on how complex the report is, we can also programmatically create the final reports.
The initial feedback from the customer is that the new cost is something they can "work with" and will compare the solution to other vendors.
I know this is not a 'clean' solution, but... needs must.
It is harder to integrate and maintain, but a 35-40% cost reduction gets us closer to the finish line.
Opinions, questions and suggestions are welcomed.
Staff Digital Transformation Engineer at Smith & Nephew
8 个月Thanks for sharing! It's always interesting to see real architecture over demos. I believe HiveMQ Edge is free and does Modbus, but that wouldn't solve the backend problem. Also, does AWS have a Postgres/TimescaleDB option like Azure? It also makes a good historian.
Building scalable solutions for flexible manufacturing
8 个月Thanks for sharing Vikan, I always like how open you are about your quotes and architectures! As you mention yourself the second option will be harder integrate and maintain, so I wonder what the TCO would be for both architectures. Some other remarks/questions: - Why do you need the SQL bridge module? I'm all for it by the way, making integration and maintenance easier it quickly pays for itself, but doesn't seem essential to me. - Do they need unlimited clients? Especially for a POC you might be able to start smaller - You could drop the Ignition reporting module and use a 3rd party reporting/BI tool - If you add Ignition BasicCare you should also add N3uron S&M I think the price could be a lot closer this way. Another thing to consider is cloud costs when running on AWS. I'm not a cloud expert by any means, but I know the big 3 aren't the cheapest. Also here you pay for convenience. Open source solutions like the MING stack and AnywhereSCADA or FUXA might be interesting too, especially if if keeping CAPEX down is the priority. By the way I'm also looking into N3uron and I think it definitely has its use cases! I often find Ignition to be an easier sell though because of the install base and available resources.