Introduction
An Energy Management Company is a specialized airport support service provider responsible for energy management and operations at one of the busiest airports in Asia. Since 2013, the company has built its first integrated energy management platform to achieve data integration across the airport's main energy control systems and building subsystems. This platform allows unified management of five major types of energy—water, electricity, gas, cooling, and heating—enabling data sharing.
However, as the volume of real-time energy data skyrocketed, the company faced significant challenges in data integration. The five energy systems operated on different communication protocols and were distributed across various locations. Combined with the massive amount of real-time data, this made it extremely difficult to consolidate energy data from different systems. Additionally, ensuring data accuracy and real-time processing became a major challenge, which not only increased operational complexity but also impacted the quality and speed of decision-making.
To address these challenges, the company decided to adopt the MQTT protocol for data transmission and leverage EMQ’s cloud-edge collaborative products for efficient and reliable real-time data transmission and processing. EMQ’s solution optimized the company’s underlying data transmission and storage architecture, helping them move away from relational databases that struggled with high-concurrency time-series data scenarios. By integrating modern time-series databases and NoSQL technologies, these improvements allowed the company to make faster, more accurate decisions while focusing more on the independent development of upper-level energy data applications.
Challenges
The company faced a series of challenges in energy data management and integration, which had long been a bottleneck in its digital development.
- Data Collection: The various energy systems used different models and brands of equipment, each operating on different communication protocols. For example, the power monitoring system used the ABB communication protocol, while the water supply system utilized Schneider's communication protocol. The inconsistency in data formats and structures, combined with diverse communication protocols, often resulted in data loss and delays during the collection process.
- Data Quality: The airport's automation systems, developed in different periods, utilized a wide range of data specifications and protocols. This requires a unified data format. Additionally, the large size of the airport and the dispersed deployment of equipment made it even more challenging to build a reliable data collection network and ensure real-time data acquisition. In practice, errors and inconsistencies in the data frequently occur, affecting the accuracy of analysis and decision-making.
- High Throughput Data Management: The airport generated a massive amount of energy data daily, necessitating robust computing power and storage capacity to support data processing and analysis. Furthermore, the airport required specialized tools and methods to effectively manage these vast amounts of data.
- Data Security and Privacy: Since energy data involves matters of national security and data privacy, strict security measures were required. This imposed higher demands on the secure storage, transmission, and application of data.
Solution
EMQ provided the company with a comprehensive, efficient, and intelligent energy data management platform, addressing the challenges of data collection and processing while improving energy efficiency and reducing operational costs.
- NeuronEX Multi-Protocol Data Collection: EMQ’s industrial edge gateway software, NeuronEX, equipped the airport with robust multi-protocol data collection and stream processing capabilities at the device level. NeuronEX enabled standardized data collection by adjusting data formats and unit conversions via SQL statements at the edge, ensuring uniform collection of various types of energy data. Even traditional devices without automation interfaces, such as mechanical meters, could be integrated into the system. This effectively consolidated the fragmented and complex device data across the airport, achieving standardized and unified data management.
- EMQX Platform Cloud-Edge Collaboration: EMQ’s flagship product, EMQX Platform, provided a unified MQTT platform in the cloud, aggregating real-time data from various energy systems. It offered integration with over 40 standard data storage systems, message queues, and other applications, enabling the company to flexibly configure its data processing architecture. EMQX Platform also provided persistent data storage, allowing the company to optimize its allocation of computing and storage resources, supporting compute-storage separation, and enhancing the scalability and flexibility of the airport’s energy data management system.
Achievements
- Smart Energy Management: The company successfully upgraded its integrated energy management system, with the new intelligent system capable of real-time monitoring of the entire airport's energy data. This enhanced energy utilization efficiency and significantly reduced the airport’s energy consumption costs.
- Energy Load Forecasting: With integrated energy data collection, the airport can leverage big data analytics to conduct in-depth analysis of energy data and perform accurate load forecasting. This provides a data-driven foundation for demand-based energy supply, helping the airport more precisely plan its energy usage.
- Application of New Energy Technologies: The airport will continue to promote the use of renewable energy technologies such as photovoltaic power and distributed energy management. These efforts aim to build a green airport, reduce reliance on traditional energy sources, and drive high-quality development in the comprehensive civil aviation energy market.