Robust Industrial Asset Performance Management solution with MQTT and UNS

Asset performance management (APM) is a strategic approach that companies use to improve the performance of their assets. APM involves using technology, processes, and people to monitor, assess, maintain, and fund assets, such as equipment, machines, vehicles, buildings, software, and technology.

In today’s industrial landscape, maintaining asset performance is critical to operational efficiency, safety, and cost management. APM is central to achieving these objectives by monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing asset performance throughout its lifecycle. With the advent of advanced analytics like AI and Gen AI, a number of asset maintenance and reliability practices are adopting those. Data is front and center for all of these APM use cases to work. However, as industrial operations become more complex and data-intensive, traditional APM solutions are often limited by connectivity and data integration challenges. This is where protocols like MQTT and frameworks like the Unified Namespace (UNS) provide robust solutions, enabling real-time, reliable, and scalable APM systems.

This article delves into how MQTT and UNS are transforming industrial asset management by overcoming connectivity issues, simplifying data integration, contextualizing data and enhancing real-time performance insights.

Key Challenges in Traditional APM Systems

Data Silos and Connectivity Issues

Traditional APM systems often operate in silos, making it challenging to gain a holistic view of asset health and performance. Legacy infrastructures and industrial protocols used to communicate to devices can be unreliable, leading to significant challenges in achieving seamless connectivity across devices and platforms.

Latency and Real-Time Data Accessibility

Real-time data processing is crucial for making timely maintenance and operational decisions. However, many traditional APM solutions suffer from latency issues due to bandwidth constraints due to which data is not real time and packets can be lost.

Scalability and System Complexity

Modern industrial facilities generate vast amounts of data. Traditional APM architectures can struggle to scale and manage the increasing volumes, leading to higher costs and increased system complexity.

MQTT: A Lightweight, Real-Time Messaging Protocol for APM

MQTT is a lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol that is ideal for constrained environments, where bandwidth and connectivity are limited. Here’s how MQTT enhances APM solutions:

Efficient Data Transfer

MQTT’s lightweight nature allows for efficient data transfer, which is particularly useful for environments with limited bandwidth or unreliable connectivity. MQTT reduces network load, ensuring data is sent only when it changes (event-driven) in small packet sizes, lowering the frequency and volume of transmissions. MQTT saves considerable bandwidth and can work in unreliable connectivity situations. 

Low Latency for Real-Time Insights

MQTT operates on a publish-subscribe model, which minimizes latency by eliminating the need for client-side polling. This enables faster data delivery, making it easier to monitor asset performance in real-time and act upon it.

Flexible and Scalable Communication

With MQTT, assets and devices can communicate within a flexible, scalable network. New devices can be added to the APM system without extensive reconfiguration, supporting the scalability requirements of modern industrial systems.

Security and Reliability

MQTT includes features such as Quality of Service (QoS) levels, session persistence, and secure transmission protocols (e.g., TLS) to ensure reliable and secure data transfer, which is crucial for sensitive industrial applications.

Unified Namespace (UNS): Single Source of Truth for Industrial Data

UNS is a central data framework that consolidates all operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) data in a single, organized structure(fig 1). UNS serves as the “single source of truth” across an enterprise, providing a consistent, unified view of data for various systems and applications.

Fig 1: Representation of a typical UNS architecture

Asset Data is typically spread across multiple systems including:

• Production asset: Capturing data points like temperature, precision, cycle times etc through smart sensors

• Programming Logic Controllers: Consolidating sensor readings, current status of actuators, machine operating parameters (temperature, pressure), alarm conditions, run-time, cycle counts, and sometimes even basic asset details like serial number, model, and location

• CMMS: Storing the asset maintenance schedules, work orders, repair history, spare parts inventory

• MES: Storing the asset performance metrics, machine status, quality measurements, production rates

• ERP: Storing the Inventory levels, raw material info, production schedules, quality control data

To get a full view of APM for assets, a combination of all these data points from these different sources is needed. A UNS using an MQTT is able to bring all this data into a single pane of glass and is able to normalize, transform and contextualize this data to enable robust analytics, reporting and monitoring to be done on the assets.

How UNS Complements MQTT in APM Solutions

While MQTT is used to transfer the IIoT data, the UNS acts as the repository and organizational layer, making it easier to contextualize, access, analyze, and act on data. Here’s how UNS supports a robust APM solution:

Centralized Data Repository

UNS collects data from all sources and centralizes it in a structured hierarchy, eliminating data silos. This centralized repository simplifies access to asset data, making it available to the entire APM ecosystem.

Standardized Data Structure

By defining a standard data structure, UNS makes it easier to integrate data from different assets and systems. This is particularly important in APM, where data from multiple sources needs to be contextualized, normalized, transformed, correlated and analyzed collectively.

Real-Time Data Accessibility

UNS supports real-time data accessibility, enabling analytics, dashboards, and monitoring systems to tap into live data. When combined with MQTT, UNS allows for real-time updates, making it easier to maintain and optimize asset performance.

Simplified System Integration

With UNS, all connected applications can access data without needing complex point-to-point integrations. This minimizes system complexity and reduces integration costs, creating a seamless data flow between the APM system and other enterprise applications.

HiveMQ for Industrial APM

HiveMQ is a proven enterprise MQTT platform that is reliable under real-world stress, is built for flexibility, security, and scale, and provides real-world solutions to support APM use cases in industries including energy, manufacturing, and transportation and logistics. The reliable, scalable and secure HiveMQ MQTT platform helps companies connect to their assets to optimize performance and extend their lifespan by providing a UNS which consolidates, normalizes, transforms and contextualizes all of the business data(fig 2).

Fig 2: Unified Namespace

HiveMQ provides a HiveMQ Edge gateway that can translate industrial asset data points in various formats like OPC UA, Modbus etc. into MQTT; store and forward the data if connection is lost; transform, normalize and contextualize the data through Data Hub so that it can all be interpreted easily and bridge to an enterprise broker. Data can be further consolidated, transformed, and contextualized in the Enterprise MQTT broker using the Data Hub feature. This enables creation of the UNS to enable the data needs for APM use cases.

Advantages of using HiveMQ for APM

Improved Data Flow and Accessibility

HiveMQ facilitates efficient data transfer and the UNS that organizes the data so that APM systems can gain access to real time, consolidated, contextualized and good quality enterprise data. This helps improve responsiveness and operational agility. This also means that maintenance actions can be triggered as soon as data anomalies are detected, reducing downtime and enhancing asset lifespan. 

Enhanced Predictive Maintenance

With real-time coming from UNS and historical data coming from historians and databases connected to the UNS accessible in one place, advanced analytics solutions can be implemented to identify patterns that predict asset failures. The low latency of MQTT along with HiveMQ’s enterprise features, enable accurate, predictive maintenance, allowing teams to fix issues before they cause disruptions.

Reduced Downtime and Operational Costs

By predicting and preventing asset failures, APM solutions driven by HiveMQ’s MQTT and UNS reduce unplanned downtime, lowering repair costs and minimizing operational interruptions. This also enables assets to operate at peak performance, maximizing their productivity.

Streamlined Data Management

Using HiveMQ MQTT and UNS solution eliminates data silos and simplifies data management. With a consistent view of all asset data, it becomes easier to implement, manage, and scale APM solutions as needs grow and more devices are added to the system.

Scalability and Flexibility for Future Growth

MQTT’s lightweight nature, UNS’s centralized architecture and HiveMQ enterprise functionality make the APM data management solution highly scalable and reliable. As new assets, sensors, or data sources are introduced, they can be seamlessly integrated into the APM system, enabling businesses to grow without extensive reconfiguration.

Real-World Use Cases of using HiveMQ for APM

Manufacturing Equipment Monitoring

In a manufacturing environment, real-time monitoring of equipment health can prevent costly breakdowns. An MQTT-UNS APM solution powered by HiveMQ enables continuous data collection, identifying performance deviations early on and initiating predictive maintenance workflows before failures occur.

Wastewater Operations

Wastewater operations require continuous monitoring of mechanical plants, pumps, lift stations, valves, collection lines, and other critical assets. HiveMQ’s MQTT solution enables real-time data collection and management even in remote or constrained environments, while UNS provides an integrated data view for comprehensive asset monitoring and risk management.

Oil and Gas Asset Management

Oil and gas facilities often involve distributed assets in remote locations. Using HiveMQ’s MQTT solution, APM systems can reliably collect and transmit performance data from these sites, while UNS ensures the data is accessible and structured for predictive maintenance and analytics.

Conclusion

The combination of MQTT and UNS offers a powerful, modern approach to Asset Performance Management in industrial settings. With MQTT providing reliable, low-latency data transfer and UNS offering a centralized, organized data layer, industrial operators gain real-time visibility and control over asset health and performance. This leads to reduced downtime, enhanced predictive maintenance, and ultimately, more efficient and cost-effective operations.

For industries facing the challenge of managing vast, diverse assets, adopting an MQTT-UNS-enabled APM system can be a critical step towards maximizing operational resilience and achieving sustainable growth. Download HiveMQ’s Asset Performance Management playbook and learn more about how we can enable your APM journey.