Battery monitoring within industry 4.0 landscape: Solution as a service (SaaS) for industrial power unit systems

The current globalization already faces the challenge of meeting the continuously growing demand for new consumer goods by simultaneously ensuring a sustainable evolution of human existence. The industrial value creation must be geared towards sustainability. In order to overcome this challenge, tightly coupling the production and its axiomatization processes is required in the paradigm of Industry 4.0. This technology bridges together a vast amount of new interconnected smart devices being mostly battery powered. Batteries are the heart of industrial motive power and electric energy storing solutions in the infrastructures of today. The charges related to the batteries are among the biggest cost (2.000–5.000 EUR per unit). Unfortunately, the batteries are not always treated properly and the badly managed ones lose their ability to store energy quickly. In this work, we present the developed modular Cloud solution utilizing Solution as a Service (SaaS) to monitor and manage industrial power unit systems. Modular approach is realized using simple miniature non-intrusive wireless sensors combined with cloud platform that provides the battery intelligence. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.