Many of our customers, and we as well, require flexible, above all scalable solutions in the digitization strategy in order to transfer process data. If data is sent to several sites, the MQTT protocol is a good choice.

But how do you design a solution to provide the different stakeholders in the company with just the data they need for their area? In response, we developed an MQTT cluster with multiple redundant nodes last year, which has been live since January 1, 2023, and which we would like to present here.

How does our MQTT cluster function?

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a protocol that allows a client and a server to communicate with each other. In short, a protocol for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). MQTT offers a lot of advantages in data transmission – such as sparse data volume and TLS encryption, so there is no need for external encryption via VPN.

Clients send their data to specific “topics” at the broker and in return can “subscribe” to desired topics, similar to a newsletter subscription. The clients can be organized in star topology, so new clients can be added especially easily. This results in a highly scalable solution, a well thought-out topic structure is mandatory for this!

This Message Oriented Middleware solution (MOM) enables us to provide our customers with a reliable interface between IT and OT!

All the complexity remains hidden from the client. From his perspective, there is simply a highly available MQTT connection over which data can be exchanged between different devices and applications.

Failure and IT security

In addition to the aforementioned encrypted data transmission using TLS, the MQTT-CLuster itself has a multi-redundant design and is thus built as a highly available, scalable decentralized architecture solution that we make available to our customers.

With this architecture, which was developed on the basis of MQTT, VerneMQ and internal encryption with Nebula, many of the previous restrictions can be thrown overboard. This not only eliminates the risk of a single-point-of-failure, but also allows us to quickly and easily scale horizontally if necessary, i.e. we expand the cluster with additional MQTT nodes when the load is higher in order to distribute the load evenly.

This is how you can imagine it…

Gaining information from data, made easy!

Large, unwieldy Excel files that are difficult to maintain and in which errors that are difficult to recognize creep in again and again are now a thing of the past.

With the help of the MQTT cluster, it is now possible to transmit, store and evaluate live all process and production values from different locations every second! Reports, live KPI’s, alarms, OEE values and much more can be generated and calculated via a connected information platform.

Damit werden Reportprozesse auf allen Ebenen des Unternehmens um ein Vielfaches vereinfacht, die Reportgenauigkeit nimmt signifikant zu, da die notwendigen Berechnungswerte direkt von der Datenquelle live herangezogen werden.

Highlights:

  • We transfer data in real time and can do without a VPN connection.
  • We simply collect the data in databases and can make it available without major hurdles, develop models, perform analyses faster, and also provide our controls on the PLC with calculations ranging from soft sensors to elaborate AI tools.
  • And last but not least, we can also make them tangible for our customers – with the specially developed web-based data platform.

…and that’s why we love MQTT!