Unified Framework to Select an IoT Platform for Industrial Energy Management Systems

Abstract

The world population is increasing at a rapid speed and so are the requirements for everyday life like energy, technology, and industries. In the past few years, there has been a huge increase and development in the industrial sector and new technology like the Internet of Things (IoT) has played a major role in it. The industrial sector is consuming a large portion of the energy worldwide and is contributing a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Hence, they face significant economic, social and environmental pressures to create energy-efficient processes and systems of production and directly manage their energy consumption, looking at aspects beyond direct costs. One of the effective ways to reduce energy consumption, cost, and greenhouse gas emissions is to use an industrial energy management system (IEnMS). The IEnMS uses IoT for (big) data collection, processing, storing, and visualization. In this case, one key challenge the industries face is the selection of an IoT platform among the hundreds of IoT platforms in the market. In this paper, we adapt our previously proposed general framework to choose an IoT platform focusing here on the requirements of IEnMS. The proposed framework provides an objective methodology that can be used to select the most suitable IoT platform for different IEnMS based on their particular requirements.