IoT today: three companies are building unique paths to the future

2

Three industries, three distinct paths to the future To illustrate how innovative companies are already using the power of IoT to shape their future, we’ve chosen three stories that reveal some of the unique applications and possibilities that IoT provides:

• Schneider Electric helps the oil and gas industry use edge computing, machine learning, and IoT to manage connected assets in remote areas around the world.

• The Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities uses IoT technology in some of the planet’s most extreme environments to improve its response to increasingly variable weather conditions.

• FarmBeats combines IoT, drone technology, and edge computing to take farming into the 21st century.

The opportunity has arrived You already know the Internet of Things (IoT) is helping real companies solve real problems, become more efficient, and drive revenue in ways that their competition isn’t expecting. The question is, how are they doing it?

Your business already creates a vast amount of data from customer interactions, systems monitoring, supply chains, and so on. This data represents an opportunity for insights and chances are you’re already using it. But what about the data and insights that you’re overlooking? The three stories that follow illustrate how IoT can help you find new ways to turn data into innovations that can help your business thrive.

From preconfigured tools and resources to custom solutions, IoT can help your company learn, adapt, and thrive in this new environment. More importantly, the right IoT solution can help you drive innovation and performance in surprising ways:

• Improve decision-making. Turn data into insights, smarter decisions, and innovations that increase business impact, help identify new business models, and drive new revenue streams. When you connect to and monitor the performance of the assets and devices that comprise a diverse line of business, it’s easier to understand its health.

• Become predictive instead of reactive. IoT helps you identify meaningful opportunities, patterns, trends, threats, and exceptions as they emerge in order to increase performance and decrease response times. You can also use it to apply historical data to new problems and predict behaviors or trends.

• Maximize productivity. IoT helps you monitor the operational status of your business assets and track their performance to automate and improve business processes.

3

Minimizing latency between generating data and taking action helps companies get more value from their IoT solutions. One of the most effective ways to do this is edge computing, which distributes computing power and analytics capabilities to IoT devices themselves. Edge computing can help companies with widely-distributed assets manage them remotely. However, some businesses have assets located without easy access to the cloud, and others are reluctant to send data outside their own networks. Energy companies typically have these types of widely distributed assets, and the volatility of oil prices puts them under constant pressure to shrink production costs and increase efficiency.

Paris-based Schneider Electric is a leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation. Its solutions, including the Realift Rod Pump Control, are critical tools for energy companies with thousands of pumps scattered across huge geographic areas.

Increasing workplace safety by reducing maintenance

Realift Rod Pump Control lets energy companies monitor and configure pump settings and operations remotely, only sending personnel onsite after something has gone wrong. Schneider knew that most industry accidents happen as workers drive between sites, not at the well sites themselves, so reducing the need for site visits would reduce accidents. As a result, Schneider decided to enhance Realift to predict problems and reduce damage when faults occur. They turned to Azure Machine Learning and Azure IoT Edge to make it happen.

“IoT Edge provided an easy way to package and deploy our machine learning applications,” says Matt Boujonnier, Analytics Application Architect for Schneider Electric. “Traditionally, machine learning is

something that has only run in the cloud, but for many IoT scenarios that isn’t good enough because you want to run your application as close as possible to any events. Now we have the flexibility to run it in the cloud or at the edge—wherever we need it to be.”

Getting better decisions in milliseconds

Now Realift can analyze readings and sense patterns that indicate impending mechanical failure or deviation from optimal operating conditions, then modify the operating parameters of the pump to avoid or mitigate the impact of the unexpected changes. It can also shut down the pump before damage occurs and notify the company that repairs are necessary—protecting the machinery and preventing potential environmental damage. Best of all, these decisions can be made in milliseconds, during moments where someone’s life could be at stake. It also reduces or eliminates excess communication between remote assets and central systems.

Deploying predictive models to edge devices helps Schneider customers meet business goals, safeguard assets, protect the environment, and boost safety. As Schneider Electric solutions manager Fahd Saghir notes, there are clear business benefits for energy company operators: “By proactively identifying pump problems through edge analytics, companies reduce unplanned downtime, which decreases costs, increases production, and increases the agility of maintenance services.”

Schneider Electric uses edge computing to predict problems

4

During the winter of 2010, the Fairbanks area endured what residents now call the “ice-pocalypse.” Temperatures shot from -25°F to 45°F in 24 hours, then it rained for three days straight, then temperatures dropped back below zero, leaving hundreds of miles of roadway sheathed in two inches of ice.

Harsh lessons for state and local governments

If the Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities (ADOT&PF) had been able to keep the ice from bonding to the pavement, then it might have averted a months-long ice slick, but crews lacked ground-level temperature readings to provide insight into the looming catastrophe. Despite chemicals, plows, and scraping, the ice stayed put for five more months.

Before 2010, ADOT&PF station managers made decisions about deploying snowplows using standard precipitation-based forecast models. Deploying plows—and buying sand and salt—is a major expense that ADOT&PF tries to avoid, but not sending them out when they’re needed puts Alaskans at risk. ADOT&PF personnel have decades of weather forecasting experience, and they work closely with the Fairbanks National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) office. Yet NOAA can’t supply the kind of hyper-local forecast data that might have helped in 2010.

In the end, much of ADOT&PF’s previous forecasting left the state using unnecessary resources, staff time, and money.

To make matters worse, a similar ice-pocalypse has occurred in northern Alaska every year since 2010. With climate models forecasting higher

global temperatures and more temperature variability, icy roads are now a constant challenge for ADOT&PF.

Mobile, hyper-local data

By 2013, ADOT&PF had already installed its Road Weather Information System (RWIS), a roadside telemetry net of eight RWIS stations in and around Fairbanks that tracks multiple factors: surface and subsurface temperature, air temperature, dew point temperature, wind speed and direction, relative humidity, precipitation, as well as other factors.

This data is uploaded into a cloud-based database called the Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS), which also incorporates NOAA atmospheric weather and forecast data to help station managers decide how and whether to deploy crews and equipment.

In 2013, ADOT&PF began to use WeatherCloud, an IoT-driven solution developed by Colorado-based Fathym, Inc. WeatherCloud creates hyper-local forecasts by combining data collected by sensors mounted on maintenance vehicles that record road temperature, humidity, precipitation, wiper frequency, pavement type, road conditions, and other factors that satellites can’t track.

These sensors transmit data to an app running on a smartphone in the truck, which uploads it to Microsoft Azure, where it is cleaned with Azure Stream Analytics then stored in Azure Blob storage and Azure Cosmos DB. It’s then used to create a dashboard showing hyper-local road conditions and further fed into the forecast model used in the MDSS.

Alaska DOT & Public Facilities uses IoT to improve weather response

5

“Of all the public cloud solutions, Azure had the most robust IoT offerings, which dramatically accelerated our development,” says Michael Gearhardt, Fathym’s Chief Technology Officer. “With Azure, we’re able to develop software significantly faster with 60 percent less code. Creating our solution outside the cloud would have taken three full-time people four months. With Azure, it took three people one month. It allows us to cut down the amount of code and technology we’re managing so we can focus on developing great weather solutions.”

In February 2016, freezing rain moved into an area near Fairbanks without RWIS coverage. Based on WeatherCloud data, Dan Schacher, Maintenance Superintendent for the ADOT&PF Northern Region, had his team treat specific roads with brine, solid chemicals, and a salt-sand mixture. “We had fantastic results. I was much more aggressive in my response than I would have been without the WeatherCloud data, and we avoided any accidents. The information we get from WeatherCloud puts us miles ahead in creating accurate forecasts. We’ve become much more proactive in our responses.”

Safer roads

ADOT&PF also collects crash data to determine how much safer WeatherCloud has made its roads. “With WeatherCloud, we’ve empowered our staff to be more proactive in fighting winter storms,” says Schacher. “Other states that have had similar solutions deployed for longer periods as part of an overall winter maintenance plan have reduced accidents in the range of 80 percent. We’re hoping to see the same kinds of results.”

Lower budgets

WeatherCloud also helps save hundreds of thousands of dollars in resources every year. Even after ADOT&PF had its budget cut by 26 percent, WeatherCloud intelligence helped Schacher’s team deliver the

same services with fewer resources. “Recently, NOAA put out two high-alert forecasts for an upcoming weather event,” Schacher says. “Using WeatherCloud data, I made the decision that the weather would not be as severe as predicted and told my crews to stand down. Sure enough, the predicted storms didn’t materialize. I saved the state a substantial sum by not deploying trucks unnecessarily. I was a happy man.”

Extended performance

WeatherCloud data also helps in summer when ADOT&PF performs paving, chip-sealing, striping, and other maintenance tasks. Even then crews must dodge rain and snow flurries, so they use WeatherCloud data to find work windows on specific stretches of road.

“Our crews in the north serve a region that is larger than Texas, so they usually can’t see weather or road conditions when planning maintenance,” Schacher says. “Instead, they rely on pole-mounted WeatherCloud sensors to determine when they’ll have a window for striping in a particular location. Previously we would send out a crew, and if it was raining or snowing, they would just sit and wait until the weather passed. With WeatherCloud, we cut down on unproductive time.”

6

Since 2011, farmer Sean Stratman has grown kale, cauliflower, broccoli, and squash on his Dancing Crow Farm 30 miles east of Seattle. The grandson of two famers, he recently started using drones and the intelligent edge to get near-real-time information on soil moisture, pests, and other issues—the kind of information that could benefit farmers around the world.

The need is critical. By 2050, world population is expected to reach 9.8 billion. Food production will have to rise dramatically, according to several studies, but farmland is limited.

A new partnership between Microsoft and drone maker DJI could make it faster, easier, and more efficient for farmers like Stratman to get information on things like soil moisture and temperature, pesticides, and fertilizer—input that is crucial for making decisions that could potentially eliminate days spent walking or driving the fields trying to detect problems.

Meet the farmer of the future

The Microsoft FarmBeats program uses TV white spaces—unused broadcast spectrum with a range of a few miles that’s plentiful in rural areas where internet connections can be spotty—to transmit data from ground-based sensors, tractors, and cameras to a computer on the farm.

Machine-learning algorithms running on Azure IoT Edge process and analyze the data and deliver cloud intelligence on the edge of a larger computing network. In Stratman’s case, the “edge” is in the barn. That’s where DJI’s PC Ground Station Pro software generates stitched aerial imagery called orthomosaics on the fly. The FarmBeats algorithms create

detailed heatmaps that quickly identify crop stress, pest infestation, disease, and other issues that can reduce yield. The maps are transmitted using TV white space to the Azure IoT Edge device on the farm.

Using Azure IoT Edge, “You don’t have to send all the data to the cloud. It sits on the farm and is able to ingest a lot of the data and then apply the intelligence on top of it to generate actionable insights for the farmer,” says Ranveer Chandra, the Microsoft principal researcher who leads the FarmBeats program. “It also makes sure that all of this data, along with the analysis, will sync with the cloud so that we have a complete, end-to-end IoT system that is able to gather a lot of data and make sense of it.”

Chandra says that precision agriculture techniques will help farmers use their water, land, and fertilizer even more wisely in the future. “It will help them become more profitable. They’ll be able to grow more crops because their yields will go up,” he says. “Whatever farming they do will be more sustainable, and it’s better for the environment. And it will help feed the world.”

FarmBeats IoT solution helps plot the future of agriculture

FarmBeats is making agriculture more efficient

Stratman also uses FarmBeats technology for a nonprofit that helps others launch their own farms. He’s used FarmBeats heatmaps for everything from planting strategy to learning where beavers had created dams along a lengthy drainage ditch, flooding some of his fields. “This next year,” he says, “I’m looking at identifying the soil humidity levels that are ideal for various soil working paths rather than putting an implement on my tractor and going out and saying, ‘The conditions are less than ideal or not right for that particular tractor implement.’”

Stratman continues, “It will be really great to look at my FarmBeats program with Azure IoT Edge, and results from the drone, and say, ‘Hey, look, my soil humidity is at 40 percent, it’s time to put on the tiller.’ It’s going to be beneficial, saving me time and trouble over doing something the old-fashioned way, the hard way.”

Thanks to the data and analytics capabilities made possible by Microsoft IoT, Stratman’s farming future is a little less uncertain. “The more data I get, the more I can correlate it to what I’m experiencing in the field, and the greater that understanding becomes,” he says. “I’m really optimistic and excited about how our knowledge will continue to grow. I have a feeling that it will become exponential at one point.”

7

8

While the impact of IoT is already being felt in manufacturing, public works, and agriculture, the potential opportunities in other sectors such as healthcare and financial services are growing as well.

Azure IoT services can help you improve decision-making, become predictive instead of reactive, and maximize productivity. The proliferation of connected devices, platforms, and protocols—and their astonishing variety—raises challenges in creating any IoT solution. Yet Azure IoT services enable you to easily pull in data from very large numbers of devices, systems, and assets, including the ones you already have.

Contact us

Find your own path to what’s possible

to find an Azure IoT solution for your business.

9

© 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed in this document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, may change without notice. You bear the risk of using it. This document does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product. You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes. You may modify this document for your internal, reference purposes.