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The new tool aims to help power industrial data projects.

Amazon Web Services this week announced the general availability of AWS IoT SiteWise Edge. This is a tool that helps industrial companies process sensor data from their equipment. It will help with such tasks as as detecting technical issues or process flaws.

As part of the digital transformation wave, manufacturers and other industrial companies are incorporating more software into their day-to-day operations. Many firms are thus adopting artificial intelligence (AI) applications that can analyze sensory logs from equipment to automatically find issues.

Leveraging AI to reduce down time and its associated costs

Companies can use AI to detect malfunctions even before they cause an outage. This in turn saves time and money by avoiding business disruptions and reducing technicians’ workloads.

Channy Yun, Principal Developer Advocate for AWS, detailed the SiteWise Edge release in a blog post this week. “With AWS IoT SiteWise Edge, you can organize and process your equipment data in the on-premises SiteWise gateway using AWS IoT SiteWise asset models,” he writes.

“You can then read the equipment data locally from the gateway using the same application programming interfaces (APIs) that you use with AWS IoT SiteWise in the cloud. For example, you can compute metrics such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) locally for use in a production-line monitoring dashboard on the factory floor.”

AWS IoT SiteWise Edge supports three common industrial protocols: OPC-UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture), Modbus TCP, and EtherNet/IP. This helps to securely connect and read sensor data from historian databases or directly from equipment, Yun says.

“After data is collected by the gateway, you can filter, transform, and aggregate the data locally using asset models defined in the cloud. You can also run AWS Lambda functions locally on the gateway to customize how the data is processed.”

Customers can thus keep sensitive data on premises to help comply with data residency requirements. They can also send data to AWS IoT SiteWise or other AWS services in the cloud, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Timestream, for long term storage and further analysis, Yun adds.