Using Industrial Internet of Things to Support Energy Efficiency and Management: Case of PID Controller

Abstract

It is generally agreed in literature that manufacturers are starting to monitor energy consumption in some capacity, whether at site level or down to specific processes and production lines. This monitoring is a prerequisite for energy saving since it enables companies to make operational changes to reduce energy consumption and costs. The main challenge to energy monitoring is the need to integrate manufacturing, and energy monitoring and control devices that support different communication protocols and are usually distributed over a wide area. This paper describes how the new networking paradigm of Industrial Internet of Things is used to show the effects of PID tuning on energy efficiency. Moreover, the paper describes how process and energy system data is transferred from devices using Open Platform Communication (OPC) technology over Ethernet to business applications such as Microsoft Excel. Finally, the paper describes how Microsoft Excel can be used to integrate process energy data with utilities’ electricity pricing information in real-time to help plant managers to make decisions on when and how to run manufacturing processes so as to optimize energy use.