RT-DAP: A Real-Time Data Analytics Platform for Large-scale Industrial Process Monitoring and Control

TL;DR

RT-DAP is a scalable, real-time data analytics platform designed for large-scale industrial process monitoring, enabling immediate insights and control by processing vast heterogeneous sensor data streams efficiently.

Contribution

The paper introduces RT-DAP, a novel real-time analytics platform that supports large-scale, continuous processing and visualization of industrial sensor data in cloud environments.

Findings

RT-DAP effectively processes large volumes of real-time data.

The platform demonstrates high efficiency in component and system performance.

Prototype implementation on Azure validates its scalability and responsiveness.

Abstract

In most process control systems nowadays, process measurements are periodically collected and archived in historians. Analytics applications process the data, and provide results offline or in a time period that is considerably slow in comparison to the performance of the manufacturing process. Along with the proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and the introduction of "pervasive sensors" technology in process industries, increasing number of sensors and actuators are installed in process plants for pervasive sensing and control, and the volume of produced process data is growing exponentially. To digest these data and meet the ever-growing requirements to increase production efficiency and improve product quality, there needs to be a way to both improve the performance of the analytics system and scale the system to closely monitor a much larger set of plant resources. In this paper, we present a real-time data analytics platform, called RT-DAP, to support large-scale continuous data analytics in process industries. RT-DAP is designed to be able to stream, store, process and visualize a large volume of realtime data flows collected from heterogeneous plant resources, and feedback to the control system and operators in a realtime manner. A prototype of the platform is implemented on Microsoft Azure. Our extensive experiments validate the design methodologies of RT-DAP and demonstrate its efficiency in both component and system levels.