Monitoring of Critical Assets

Sensors used in the MANTIS project must be able to measure the physical phenomenon relevant for the assets’ condition. Examples of this include temperature, light intensity, pressure, fluid flow, velocity, and force among others. Anyhow, it is not a trivial problem for a given installation, where an adequate measurement solution must be chosen or developed in order to accurately and robustly acquire data about the physical process related to each MANTIS use cases [Jantunen et al., 2017].

Another relevant matter is the cost of the monitoring solution. Industry is always aiming for cost savings and a better market positioning. Therefore, new technological solutions such as WSNs have become a strategic asset in this context, increasing the interest of the industrial companies. This type of sensor networks is used to share information with the purpose of increasing productivity, gathering data for developing future technological improvements and/or detecting/predicting maintenance issues. Moreover, even when a single sensor is considered instead of a WSN, the use of wireless communications provides flexibility, installation ease, weight reduction, which makes them suitable for many applications, conditions and situations.

Industrial environments usually have hostile site conditions, both for the sensors themselves and for the wireless communication systems, and a section is devoted to the analysis of the issues and the solutions raising in these environments.

Finally, a section is focused on the intelligent functions that can be offered by CPS, both to preprocess collected data and to support the CPS itself.