EDGE CONNECT
Real-Time Data Connectivity
for Industry 4.0 and
Distributed Energy
IOTech’s Edge Connect is a high-performance edge software platform designed for time-critical and resource-constrained industrial systems, including the next generation of AI-enabled Distributed Energy Resource (DER) deployments.
EDGE CONNECT COMPONENTS
Modular Platform Components for Real-time
OT Connectivity and Edge Data Management
Edge Connect can be deployed on a single edge device or distributed across multiple nodes in a large-scale federated system.
PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE
Designed for Scalability, Performance and Flexibility
Multi-protocol OT device connectivity
Real-time data acquisition and aggregation
AI-ready edge data processing
Edge data storage and historization
Industry standard device and alarm data normalization
Secure data access for local edge or remote Cloud/IT
TOOLS & OPERATIONS
Powerful Tools for Operational Teams
A suite of integrated tools to configure, monitor and manage Edge Connect deployments at any scale.
Edge Connect UI
Provides runtime configuration and monitoring of Edge Connect instances and their connected devices.
OPC UA Browser
Interact with and browse the namespace of connected OPC UA Server(s).
Sparkplug Client
Attach to the MQTT message bus to easily read and write SparkplugB messages.
Edge Manager
Provides centralized orchestration and fleet management for Edge Connect deployments.
SparkplugB over MQTT
To enable scalable, loosely coupled, federated architectures, SparkplugB over MQTT is used as the core data backbone between Edge Connect components and also to stream data to other edge applications or Cloud/IT endpoints.
It is also used to receive commands from external applications, for example from a control system to change a setting on a piece of equipment
EDGE CONNECT KEY BENEFITS
Delivering Value at the Industrial Edge
Edge Connect is a powerful embedded OT connectivity solution used by leading industrial OEMs to enable real-time acquisition, aggregation, and processing of operational data. It provides a range of benefits that help organizations improve their edge technology ROI, achieve competitive advantage and deliver the next generation of AI-enabled industrial solutions to the market more quickly.
Simplifying OT Connectivity and Real-time Data Acquisition
Simplifies the development of connected real-time edge software applications, enabling faster time to market and supporting the next generation of Industry 4.0 solutions.
Provides extensive out-of-the-box connectivity for leading OT protocols including Modbus, OPC UA, BACnet, EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, Siemens S7, MQTT and many more.
Optimized Performance & Scalability
Written in C for portability, small footprint, and ultra high performance/low latency data acquisition and processing. It scales massively to connect to hundreds of device endpoints and can access hundreds of thousands of data points concurrently.
Easy Application Integration via Normalized OPC UA Data Layer or MQTT
Aggregated system wide OT data can be easily integrated into 3rd party edge application stacks (e.g. a SCADA system) via an Industry 4.0 standard OPC UA server layer, or alternatively via MQTT.
High Performance, Scalable Data Historization
In business critical industrial systems such as a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), for both operational and regulatory reasons the persistence of system wide OT data is mandatory. Edge Connect’s Historian component is a horizontally scalable service built on the latest PostgreSQL database technology and has been designed to support hundreds of thousands of time series data metric transactions per second.
Complete Deployment Flexibility
Key Edge Connect components can be deployed as native Linux executables, docker containers or in the case of Edge Xrt even as a shared library linked directly into your application’s runtime for maximum performance.
AI Enablement
High quality, time series data with contextualized tagging is critical to enabling AI at the industrial edge. Edge Connect can normalize, aggregate, tag and transform OT data across your system to support a wide range of data driven AI use cases such as a process optimization, fault detection, video inference, predicative maintenance, and demand forecasting for DERs.
Runs on ANY Device
Edge Connect is a platform-independent solution that runs on any silicon (ARM or x86), operating system (including many Linux variants but also on Windows when components are deployed as docker containers) and hardware variants (MCUs, Edge Gateways, IPCs and Server class devices). Edge Connect enables the development of portable solutions that are easier to support and maintain.