Introduction
The term ‘Internet of Things’ is coined by Kevin Ashton co-founder of the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Internet of Things is just an ecosystem, the physical things which are connected to the internet.
These physical things include smartphones, tablets, wearable device and the different devices which contain different types of the sensor within them. IoT has the ability to transfer data over the network.
IoT has impacted each growing sector and boosted there growth. In this use case we are going to discuss some uses of IoT in different sectors using Google Cloud Platform.
Solution for Retail
Predictive maintenance is used for managing energy, predicting equipment failure or detecting other issues. IoT in retail helps to enable precise inventory management, and most importantly enhancing the consumer’s shopping experience. As the trend of e-commerce is growing day by day, the walk-in stores also needs to upgrade themselves to give better service to their customers.
In retail IoT can be used to implement smart shelves which can help us to manage the inventory. This enables sensor based item tracking. These smart inventory helps to track if any item goes out of stock or the item got expired, reducing theft, enhancing the customer’s shopping experience. The collected data is helpful in identifying the customer’s interest towards the products.
Google Cloud Platform can be used to enable this smart retail. We build this solution for one of our client by using Google Cloud Platform components.
Solution offered
IoT enabled machinery will enable operation managers to manage the factory units remotely. The use of IoT sensors in manufacturing equipment enables condition-based alerts that are designed to function within specific temperature and vibration range. This helps operation manager to take any proactive action in case of any failure and to prevent the loss as well the machines. IoT sensors can also be used to build a solution that counts the quantity of the manufactured parts by each machine. This collected data can be helpful to track each machine’s production and help in out if any machine is not achieving the target production value.
Using Google Cloud Platform, we build a solution for an industry which have thousands of machines installed at multiple location and each machine has assigned a threshold value for temperature, oil pressure and amperage and they wants to collect this data(temperature, oil pressure, amperage) in real-time and to detect the anomaly. In case of anomaly they need to generate an alert message to the operation managers and shut the machine down for the maintenance before it crashes.
To build this solution, we used Google Cloud function(Google cloud’s serverless platform). Google Cloud Function is a highly auto scalable, highly available compute platform which doesn’t need any servers and we just need to pay as the our runs.
Technology Stack
- Google Pub/Sub
- Google IoT Core
- Google Cloud Function
- Google Cloud DataFlow
- Cloud ML
- BigTable
- BigQuery
- Cloud Storage
- DataStudio