How Internet of Things (IoT) Edge Computing is Used by Volkswagen Group, Bharat Light & Power, Eneco, SISAG, and Deep Sky Vineyard: Case Studies

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The Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing play a major role in how organizations in a variety of industries operate.

Below are some examples of how IoT and edge computing technologies helped a range of organizations improve their workflows:

See more: The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Market

5 IoT Edge Computing Case Studies

1. Deep Sky Vineyard

Deep Sky Vineyard is a family-owned wine producer. They source grapes from vineyards in Arizona and Argentina.

After an incident of a broken irrigation valve that flooded one of their vineyards, they turned to Google Cloud to better manage, track, and analyze data coming in from their farms.

“The beauty of what we have with Google Cloud Platform and niolabs is perspective,” says Phil Asmundson, owner of Deep Sky Vineyard. “This year, I already know several ways we’ll improve our grapes. 

“Without this digital solution from Google and niolabs, we wouldn’t have the invaluable insights needed to make these decisions.”

Industries: Agriculture, forestry, and fishing

IoT solutions: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Cloud IoT Core, Google Data Studio, and Cloud Pub/Sub

Outcomes:

• Saving 1.6 million gallons of aggregation water annually
• Reduced human error by 75%
• 30% labor savings with optimized farming schedules
• 50% efficiency boost in production

Read the full Sky Deep Vineyard and Google Cloud IoT Core case study.

2. Eneco 

Eneco is a producer and supplier of natural gas, electricity, and heating in the Netherlands, serving over 2 million households.

Eneco collaborated with Microsoft and used Azure IoT components to build a smart grid solution to communicate with the numerous energy meters located at households and industrial units.

“Almost immediately after building the platform, we realized that we had many, many use cases that could benefit from it,” says Paolo Herde, manager of smart grid and innovation at Eneco. “The possibilities feel limitless.

“Previously, a field engineer would check the status of a household’s smart meter only once a year. Now, we have this data on a 15-minutes basis.”

Industry: Energy

IoT solutions: Azure IoT Hub, Azure IoT Edge, Azure Device Provisioning Service, and Azure Event Grid

Outcomes:

• Continuously monitors the state and health of their units
• Achieved a 10-degree temperature reduction in their heat distribution network
• Lowered CO² emissions
• Connected over 10,000 devices and share six million messages daily

Read the full Eneco and Microsoft Azure IoT Hub case study.

3. SISAG AG

SISAG is a Swiss company that manages cable cars in over 650 ski resorts worldwide. 

In order to provide electrical control, automation, and information systems to run a smart system of cable cars, gondolas, and chairlifts, SISAG built SisControl Cockpit using various Microsoft Azure solutions.

“It’s so much easier to maintain SisControl in Azure than it was on-premises,” says Michael Arnold, SisControl product owner at SISAG. “We developed it quickly, and we can support our customers faster too — there’s huge business value in this solution.”

Industries: Travel, transportation

IoT solutions: Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Services Bus, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Stack Hub

Outcomes: 

• Receiving faster insights in the cloud
• Processing high volumes of data efficiently
• Mobile access for technical engineers
• Compatible with Azure AI

Read the full SISAG and Microsoft Azure IoT Edge case study.

4. Volkswagen Group

Volkswagen Group is a German motor vehicle manufacturing company. With a global market, Volkswagen must test and apply 25 different labels that contain country-specific safety and usability data.

To increase automation, Volkswagen developed an intelligent Sign Inspector (iSI) using AWS cloud and IoT solutions. They now utilize IoT-enabled devices to perform label inspection and send the data to their native cloud system, Digital Production Platform (DPP), which was built in collaboration with AWS.

“We benefit from the DPP Connect team, which provides standardized IoT solutions for our plant floor equipment,” says Winfried Oberkersch, product owner of AI-based computer vision at Porsche, Volkswagen Group. “With our modular approach and standardized services, we can bring iSI solutions to other Volkswagen Group brands and use ICV functionalities to implement more use cases for all production logistics.”

Industry: Automotive

IoT solutions: AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Greengrass, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Aurora.

Outcomes:

• Reduction in label defects during production
• Automated sign inspection
• Translate labels into workers’ language

Read the full Volkswagen Group and AWS IoT Core case study.

5. Bharat Light & Power 

Bharat Light & Power is a renewable energy generation and distribution company based in India. Through AI-Based IoT, they’re able to provide solar and wind energy solutions to commercial and industrial consumers.

“We’ve enabled one of the largest electrical companies in India to compare production line performance by capturing data from PLC and SCADA systems and extracting it to Google Cloud for processing, analysis, and reporting,” says Tejpreet Singh Chopra, CEO at Bharat Light & Power.

Industry: Energy

IoT solutions: Google Cloud, Google Cloud IoT Core, Cloud Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Cloud Functions, and EDGE TPU

Outcomes:

• Reduced costs by 10%
• Increased manufacturing productivity by 5%
• Supports monitoring, reporting, and analytics for over 2,000 wind turbines
• Processes 8 million data points per day

Read the full Bharat Light & Power and Google Cloud IoT Core case study.

See more: Best IoT Platforms & Software