Build Your Smart City with Future-Proof IIoT Gateways

Rapid urbanization is compelling governments and municipal authorities around the world to find new ways to optimize their infrastructure. Smart cities seem to be the only way forward when it comes to increasing efficiency and improving services in cities. In this article, we discuss how Moxa’s Industrial IoT (IIoT) gateways can provide the computing backbone required for two smart city applications— Solar Energy Storage and Monitoring and Remote Asset Management for Intelligent Transportation Systems—thereby making it possible for city authorities to solve issues relating to sustainability and quality of life in communities.

Commercial and Residential Solar Energy Storage and Monitoring

Smart power management and the integration of sustainable energy sources into the power grid are the keys to maintaining continuous power supply to smart cities. Utility-scale solar power stations with electric power capacity of more than 50 MW are being built to meet the growing demand for solar power. Furthermore, residential solar energy has received a substantial boost because of the clean-energy initiatives and tax credit extensions by many governments around the world, which have enabled solar service providers to bring costs down low enough to attract residential users. Both these systems now have the capability to feed excess power back to the electric grid for future consumption. Solar energy storage and monitoring systems are helping solar power operators collect and process data from edge devices, making it possible for them to increase efficiency and overcome power outages in smart cities. These energy storage and monitoring systems require a reliable and efficient computing platform with the following capabilities:

• Industrial-grade embedded edge computers for remote monitoring, data acquisition, data logging, and protocol conversion of inverter data to monitor solar panel effectiveness
• Remote monitoring of the battery temperature for cooling system control
• Wi-Fi and 4G LTE communication redundancy to ensure data accuracy for energy usage and billing
• Web-based device management for easy remote maintenance
• An open platform with long-term support for application development

Remote Asset Management for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)

In smart cities, intelligent transportation systems are already an essential part of people’s daily lives. Keeping such a complex system operating smoothly is a big challenge for city transportation authorities.

City transportation authorities need to know when there has been a system failure and be able to remotely diagnose the problem in real time. Since there are often thousands of devices deployed across the city, they also need to be able to remotely reboot systems without deploying personnel unless it is absolutely necessary. In addition, they must keep track of the health of the equipment and provide preventative maintenance to avoid system failures, and be able to remotely configure and manage on-site equipment.

Moxa’s Industrial IoT Gateways

Moxa’s UC Series industrial computers are highly integrated Arm-based Linux platforms that include Moxa Industrial Linux (MIL). The gateways feature:

• Long-term support
• Reliable operation
• Fast development
• Strong security

Moxa is a member of The Linux Foundation® and is part of its Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project that aims to create an open-source platform for managing and monitoring smart cities, civil infrastructure, and factories to make them secure, reliable, scalable, and sustainable.

Download the Moxa guidebook to learn how to enable protocol conversion, data processing, and remote monitoring in smart cities.