Guide: Modeling Equipment and Machines as Assets¶
This guide discusses how to use the functionality around Assets and Subsystems for modeling physical equipment, machines, and systems.
What you should learn from this guide:
Assets & Subsystems can model:
- Physical equipment, machines, vehicles, and assets
- Systems (multiple pieces of equipment making a large system)
- For more complex assets, parts of the system can be described with Subsystems
The ExoSense asset functionality is designed to digitally represent all kinds of different equipment, machines, and systems. These assets represent both realtime and historical collected data, conditions, and states of the equipment with functionality available to organize, manage, and visualize the equipment from an access controlled web interface.
Some examples of systems assets can represent:
- Motors, Pumps, Hydraulic Power Units (HPU)
- Electrical equipment, generators, controls,
- charging stations, solar arrays, wind turbines
- Utility monitoring equipment, valves, water and wastewater management systems
- Manufacturing Machines, CNC machines, extruders
- Building environmental equipment, air handlers
- Agricultural sensor environmental systems
- Vehicles, construction vehicles, electrical vehicle fleets
- engines, pistons, mining equipment
- Door and gate systems
Functionality Overview¶
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Assets
- An Asset is used as a digital representation of a physical machine or piece of equipment. i.e. Digital Twin
- It's source of data is at least one IoT source device. ExoSense supports 1 device to 1 asset, many devices to 1 asset, or 1 device source to many assets.
- Assets are organized in the group hierarchy for determining access control. See the guide on using group hierarchy
- An asset has an overall status ( ), which is calculated based on all of its signal rule statuses.
-
Data
Data can be represented as one of the following object types for an asset:
- Signals are streams of timestamped data, for example representing a sensor. Signals are a part of a data pipeline for the asset.
- Content is files that are uploaded by device sources and users. Examples are high resolution data captures, custom externally created report PDFs, manuals, or schematics for the equipment.
- Metadata are key / value pieces of information, typically for more static, informational data added. An example is a model number.
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Dashboards
- An asset may have one or multiple dashboard that provide visualizations of the asset's data.
- Each dashboard has panels configured to view signals, content, metadata, and status.
- The dashboards can be made available to all with view access or only to those with asset management permission.
-
Subsystems
- A subsystem is like a flexible label or a tag that can be applied to signals within an asset, such as
electricalorexhaustoranalytics. - Subsystems are typically used in assets that have a large set of signals (100s) to help organize and track data
- A signal may be a part of one or many subsystems and can be used to represent physical separate parts of the equipment or any other way to organize.
- Subsystems can be tied to one of the assets dashboards. Subsystems have a status, calculated based on all of the signal rules in that subsystem.
- A subsystem is like a flexible label or a tag that can be applied to signals within an asset, such as
Example: Representing a Pump ¶
As an example, we will start by modeling a pump, which has electrical, mechanical, fluid, and operational considerations that could be measured and analyzed. In this case, we will assume there are sensors available to measure electrical current, bearing temperature, flow, and vibration. In real world applications its possible to gather even more sensor data from a single pump but for the purposes of understanding how to use Assets in ExoSense, we are going to keep this first example simple.
We will also assume our 4 sensors are all connected and read by a single IoT edge device, which is already connected to Exosite's IoT connector Device APIs. For a detailed guide on connecting devices and this data interface, check out Connecting a Device
Device Source¶
The IoT device in this example is configured to send a value for each sensor every 30 seconds. The device will send each as a channel. When viewing the device in ExoSense, it would be shown with 4 channels representing each of these sensors. Each channel has been defined as a part of a configuration with a data type, data unit, and optionally properties like report rate, a timeout rate, etc.
| Sensor | Data Type | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Motor Bearing Temperature | Temperature | Degrees Celsius |
| Flow Rate | Flow | LPS |
| Current Draw | Electrical Current | A |
| Vibration RMS Peak | Velocity | mm/s |
Here is what that device would look like in ExoSense.
Why does it matter what the data type and unit are?
As a source of truth to ensure that the entire solution pipeline and visualizations know how to present the data.
Asset Signals¶
From these 4 sensor channels we can create an Asset with 4 signals, as we start to create a digital representation of the physical equipment. Each signal has been setup to store history, all of the values with a timestamp will be available historically. Signals that are sourced from a IoT device may change their source if say the hardware needed to be swapped out.
Visualization¶
Now that the signals are available, dashboards can be created in the asset to visualize these signals. Dashboard panels can support realtime last values and/or show history.
ExoSense supports a wide array of high configurable panels.
More information can be found in Dashboards Overview
Status¶
Now that you can see the realtime and historical sensor data for how the equipment is operating, these signals can leverage rules to detect event states, show status, and notify of a state change for the operating condition of the pump.
On the signals, we will set up threshold rules which can look for a warning, critical, or error state beyond the expected operating conditions. Exosite's off the shelf rules allow evaluation of not only thresholds, but to evaluate based on time durations and/or counts of values. Is the data over the threshold being sustained for minutes as an example to alleviate false positives or edge case triggers.
A detected rule status event state change has the following impact
| Functionality | Rule Status Change Impact |
|---|---|
| Event Log | Events are recorded in the Asset's event log |
| Signal Status | The Signal status is evaluated along with any other rules on the signal. |
| Asset Status | The Asset status is evaluated against all other signal statuses. |
| Notifications | Notifications will trigger on rule state changes. Users will receive notifications based on subscription filters. |
| Conditions | If a rule has a condition policy associated with it, a new condition may be created if one is not open. |
| Action Functions | Action functions connected to the rule will be triggered. |
| Visualization | Realtime status of signals is available to show in dashboard panels. Built-in Rule Thresholds are available to be used in dashboard panels. Asset Status will be shown in views of assets such as grid fleet views, maps, and side navigation. |
With these rules now setup and detecting status, we can update the dashboard to include rule information and to show status. You can see in the screenshot below the panels are showing thresholds that have been set up. Since one of the signals (Motor Bearing Temperature) is now in a Warning state, any panels with that signal show this indication and the warning color.
You can find more about using rules here.
Metadata and Content¶
For other more static information about equipment that is not flowing from connected IoT devices, metadata fields can hold data like serial numbers, a last maintenance date, a link to a guide, etc. These flexible data stores can also be used on the asset grid view for sorting.
Files can be uploaded as Asset Content such as schematics, manuals, images, and reports.
Metadata and Content files may be displayed and interacted with using dashboard panels.
Next steps¶
We've now created a digital twin representing our physical pump, with real-time visualization of how it is operating and helpful information for future maintenance and support.
Some possibilities for what you can do next:
- Add additional sensors and data stream signals
- Build out new dashboard visualizations based on customer and service needs
- Use this asset as a template to create 100 or 1000's of similar assets
- Create real-time insight functions for algorithms such as detecting pump health
- Add more advanced edge capabilities for full vibration FFTs to upload
- Integrate with analytics and data science tools for historical large data set analysis
- Integrate with custom report generators
Additional References