With DataSpider, Hitachi Zosen built an IoT platform in one month

Originally founded as Osaka Iron Works by Mr. E.H. Hunter in 1881, Hitachi Zosen creates earth sustainability products that range from energy-from-waste plants and water treatment facilities for the environmental plant business; to energy-efficient marine engines and presses for the machinery business; and facilities such as shield machines and bridges as part of the social infrastructure business.

To further worldwide sustainability and recycling goals, Hitachi Zosen made a commitment to focus on products related to energy and water. Part of the effort involved the creation of the Hitz Advanced Information Technology Center, which spearheads activities for the remote monitoring of equipment assets and infrastructure by using IoT technology and big data analysis of environmental plants, machinery, and social infrastructure.

The IoT monitoring and data collection performed at Hitz can monitor a plethora of different equipment assets and infrastructures from many diverse industries, platforms and applications. However, to facilitate this monitoring, Hitachi Zosen needed to find a data processing and integration software solution that was able to collect and process IoT data from a multitude of sources, applications and industries.

Finding a universal IoT data integration platform that could scale

“DataSpider allows data processing to be implemented with no need to perform programming,” said Mr. Yamada. “This was very attractive because it eliminated the need for us to do this programming ourselves. DataSpider was also able to fill the role of the type of simple and straightforward data processing platform we had in mind, because it provided very intuitive GUI-driven operations.”

For Hitachi Zosen, real time data collection was critical and DataSpider made it easy because it supported AWS and also provided many triggers for data collection and publication.

“We were also impressed with the abundance of different data script trigger functions that DataSpider offered,” said Mr. Yamada. “These functions gave us enormous flexibility in our data operations. For example, we could execute a script when a file was stored in a designated folder, and still maintain a high degree of compatibility with AWS.”

DataSpider provides flexibility and supports different data formats

The processing of IoT data that Hitachi Zosen collects begins with many hundreds of data items that are sent to AWS via a gateway that is integrated with a programmable logic controller (PLC). The PLC controls filtration devices called filter presses that are manufactured by Hitachi Zosen. From here, the data is sent to DataSpider, which organizes the data in formats that are appropriate for the systems (e.g., Amazon S3, Amazon RDS) that the data interfaces with.

As part of the process, Hitachi Zosen also uses a mechanism that sends urgent data, such as alerts, directly from DataSpider to data visualization tools and to system administrators.

Hitachi Zosen’s project team additionally found that by using DataSpider‘s specification-document creation function, scripts, icons and variables could be reused throughout the entire project. This eliminated repetitive “do over” processes, and reduced the risk of introducing errors.

“It is always advantageous when you can reduce the number of tasks in a project that depend on the skills of specific individuals,” said Yokota. “It also makes it easier for our employees to pass along responsibilities to their successors.”

Skills transfer is further facilitated by the many sample scenarios that DataSpider provides for specifying settings. “The sample scenarios are helpful, because they make it easier to gain a clear idea of the processing, especially when you are performing these tasks for the first time,” said Yokota.

Future platform evolution

“DataSpider’s flexibility gives us the potential to create new avenues of added business value for our customers and ourselves,” said Yamada. “By using DataSpider as a key element of our IoT platform, we will be able to integrate new types of mission-critical system data such as maintenance data and parts inventory information. In this environment, advance processing will be necessary to perform data analysis. We expect to be able to utilize DataSpider for that as well.”

Customer Benefits

• The creation of a scalable IoT platform in just one month
• Data processing without programming knowledge through an intuitive GUI
• Ability to store data in different formats without a heavy burden on IT