Introduction
Connecting industry “things” embedded with electronics, software, and sensors to internet enabling to collect and exchange data without human interaction called as the Internet of Things (IoT).
As we can see in the diagram below, the need for inter-connected devices is growing exponentially each year.
WISE-PaaS (Platform as a Service) stands between the domain-specific cloud and IoT devices, providing a modular operating environment for system integrators. Not only does it provide seamless sensor information transmission and remote management control, its open RESTful API/SDK protocols establish standard connection and communication between all the sub-systems. The Integrated IoT software and cloud platform plays a key role in the development of IoT applications, analysis of IoT big data, the continued optimization of work flow and future expandability of the system
WISE-PaaS Platform consists of four characteristics: networking, cloud services, intelligent analysis, and application innovation. Networking provides the ability to collect all kinds of key data such as equipment, software, and personnel data. Cloud services enable big data storage, management, and computing based on cloud computing architecture. Intelligent analysis provides an analytical service framework to enhance, accumulate, and reuse knowledge. Application innovation provides an open application development environment through the function and resource scheduling on the platform, greatly shortening application development times.
For system integrators and developers, WISE-PaaS offers a set of ready-to-use services that you no longer have to be concerned about installing software or dealing with virtual machine images or hardware. As a leader of industrial computer manufacturing, Advantech leverages its understanding of wide range of industrial devices and protocols, so WISE-PaaS provides not only pure cloud services but also complete cloud-edge integrated services to help customers to develop IoT solutions.
Our platform provides three key components for a complete IoT solution:
- IoT Sensing Devices: Provides device sensing services including monitoring, industrial protocol connecting, and data plugins.
- Edge Intelligence Servers (EIS): Provides edge intelligence services including edge-side streaming analytics, data ingestion, device management, and protocol connectors.
- Cloud Services: Provides end-to-end security, data infrastructure, data analytics, visualization, and DevOps services.
Market Place, a WISE-PaaS IoT software platform service, offers a wide range of IoT software and services, allowing customers to select and purchase any type of IoT software solution at Market Place without installation.
Edge Intelligence Service
Advantech WISE-PaaS IoT software platform service is based on the three key components to accomplish the IoT solution: IoT Sensing Device, Edge Intelligence Server (EIS) and Cloud Service. Advantech would focus on the edge device development to provide the EIS software suite including the southbound (downward) sensing device connectivity that handles diverse sensing protocols such as Modbus, OPC, BACnet, Wireless IP/Non-IP, and so on. Those protocols have a corresponding plugin module to realize data communication with WISE-PaaS and monitor sensor status and process the data normalization tasks.
EIS mainly deals with northbound (downward) cloud connections and device intelligence and handles management services for different cloud platforms and different devices by microservice container-based modules. The EIS intelligent facility also uses microservice containers to handle data acquisition such as data preprocessing and cleansing. The most valuable facility on EIS software suite is streaming analytics. Advantech provides PMQ (Predictive Maintenance and Quality) for IPC (Industrial Computer), which enables real-time analysis on edge devices. The cloud, based on the microservices of container technology, may continuously update these modules according to different business purposes, and the updated modules can be applied to the edge devices. Customers can leverage this framework to develop their own analytic module or PMQ module with EIS open standard architecture. The entire open standard will follow the MQTT protocol and the Docker container technology as foundation framework.
The Edge interface provides RESTfuls API, MQTT and Node-red to the client’s developers to develop their own applications. Node-red can develop its own solutions with a few simple steps through a very user-friendly UI. In addition, the MQTT SDK sample code, RESTful API interfaces and documentation provide advanced developers with the technical data they need.
End-to-end Security Services
WISE-PaaS platform provides layered security polices and services that can be used by application developers to secure their end-to-end applications including:
Platform Security
The platform adopts the user account and authentication service (UAA) to secure the platform services and provide a single sign on for applications. UAA complies with oAuth2 specification that supports all the core oAuth2 token grant types. By default, UAA uses a Base64-encoded JSON token and a JSON-based Web Token (JWT) specification. WISE-PaaS uses role-based access control (RBAC), with each role granted permissions to either a tenant ORG or a SPACE.
Data Security
The platform provides SSL/TSL security mechanisms for data communications, and whitelist protection is enabled on edge devices to provide data security management from devices to the cloud.
Application Security
The platform runs the application inside a secure container and secures containers through the following measures:
- Running application instances in unprivileged containers by default to increases security by eliminating the threat of root escalation inside the container.
- By limiting functionality and access rights of containers to mitigate against container breakout and denial of service attacks.
- Only allowing outbound connections to public addresses from application containers. (This is the default. Administrators can change this behavior of ASG by configuring ASGs. For more information about ASGs, see the Application Security Groups)
Data Infrastructure Service
The data infrastructure service enables IoT application developers to bring data into the WISE-PaaS cloud and make it available for their industrial applications. The data is brought in by edge devices that provide local intelligence to cleanse and aggregate data upfront and establish a connection with the WISE-PaaS Cloud to send data through WISE-Agent. WISE-PaaS provides a space for IoT applications. Developers can deploy back-end microservices to receive and pre-process data. They can also develop services such as WEB service and data analysis. Finally, they store data in appropriate types of data storage, no matter it is NoSQL (non-SQUL/time series database) for sensor data storage, or RDBMS (relational database management system) for data application and management. PostgreSQL DB and MONGO NoSQL DB are standard products available currently and they also support the integration of ODBC standard interfaces. In addition, these data can be incorporated into various dashboard tools. The dashboard will be the last mile of the IoT application, and WISE-PaaS data services can be visualized using visualization tools such as Azure PowerBI or Tableau.
Data Visualization Service
The data visualization tool is very important. It can make data more accessible and provide intuitive analysis that allows an entire organization’s staff to have a clear view of the data. The WISE-PaaS data visualization service is easier to operate than earlier versions of traditional statistical analysis software or BI software. This makes it possible to implement a data visualization interface based on specific business purposes without the support of IT professionals.
Data visualization software also plays an important role in big data and advanced analysis projects. As companies accumulate more data under the big data trend, they need a quick and easy way to get an overview of the data. Visualization tools can provide these services in a convenient way.
Intelligent Dashboards
WISE-PaaS/Dashboard is based on the open source Grafana, which provides diverse and aesthetic data presentation styles. It supports varied data sources and databases, as well as plentiful data presentations.
The data sources and display components support plugin development and expansion. Grafana Labs provide various plug-ins developed officially or by the community.
WISE-PaaS/Dashboard adds a lot of features on the basis of Grafana, allowing seamless access to platform data and the reapid development of a variety of commercial intelligent dashboards or information situation rooms.
Intelligent Analysis Framework Service (AFS)
WISE-PaaS offers data science capabilities that enable a feedback loop between operational and historical analytics. Operational analytics at the edge ensure the efficient operation of assets,and those analytic models can be updated or upgraded over time based on historical analysis. WISE-PaaS/AFS (Analytics Framework Service) is a classification management system for analysis plans and analysis modules:
- Supports analysis application developers with developing analysis modules
- Supports system integrators with assembling analysis modules into analysis solutions through drag and drop interfaces
- Provides lifecycle management of analysis solutions and analysis modules through task management functions
- Provides a variety of algorithm libraries to seamlessly bind back-end distributed computing resources
- Realizes rapid operation of analysis solutions and analysis modules
