Customer
The customer is a hardware manufacturer of various devices for access control, time tracking, and production data acquisition. The devices are supplied to companies creating solutions for access control in buildings and personnel time tracking. The customer’s products are integrated into higher-level systems, such as a personnel accounting system.

Challenge
The customer wanted to seamlessly integrate the newly developed IoT platform and personnel accounting control system to support unique industry application requirements and provide a way to run apps in an on-premises environment.
We needed to provide a process of secure data transfer migration from the IoT platform to the client`s ERP system, as well as the integration of two-way interfaces of the platform and business applications.

Solution
Our engineers have created a solution providing communication between the IoT platform and the customer's enterprise infrastructure system. For improved interoperability, we only used open-source and cross-platform components that ensure high network connectivity for large volumes of data.
ERP can obtain data streams from the edge and platform tiers, and allows or denies access to the requested location. Only personnel with appropriate permissions get access to the specified area.

Integration of edge devices and the IoT platform

The functionality of the developed solution:

  • Data access. The solution makes it possible to customize and transmit dataflows from edge devices to personnel accounting control systems.
  • Data transformation. The user can filter and transform data into different formats and for different interfaces based on the requirements of specific business applications.
  • Data storage. Relational and time-series database management systems are used. The collected and processed data is accessible from the customer's server via RESTful API (ODATA protocol).
  • GUI integration. We developed a Web API based on RESTful API allowing seamless integration into the client’s web applications. Our development team created an application using the Angular framework allowing the client to manage the IoT platform via current web browsers.
  • System monitoring. Users can remotely monitor the performance of the data transfer interface and access acknowledge interface.
  • IoT platform management. The system allows the user to control the operation of the IoT platform, manage edge devices using enterprise applications.

Also, the developed IoT platform fully meets the requirements for:

  • Scalability. The developed system provides scaling to integrate the number of controlled areas required by the customer.
  • Flexible deployment. The system can be installed in cloud storage or on-premise (local server, single-board PC) depending on the number of controlled locations required by the customer.
  • Reliability. The offline operating mode is used as a basic mode or can provide the system operation in case of intermittent connectivity.
  • Remote maintenance. The system operator can remotely update the system software to keep the solution up-to-date.
  • Security. Strong encryption provides enterprise-grade security for all data.

Results
The client uses its personnel accounting system for data acquisition and management of the IoT platform with a vast number of edge devices. The solution makes it easy to operate data flows and control the large-scale system using the interfaces of the client ERP system.