Key Outcomes:
Stateful and intelligent device twins of Electric Vehicles and Chargers
Isolated software platform from dependence on hardware
Dynamic data generation based on the realistic behaviour of devices.
Rapid prototyping capability to develop IoT Applications
Esri specializes in Geographic Information System Software, and they have been the global leaders in the location intelligence and mapping space for over five decades. Their product, ArcGIS Velocity, makes it easy to consume, visualize, and analyze streaming data in real time. ArcGIS enables its users to ingest data from IoT platforms, message brokers or third-party APIs and process, visualize and analyze these feeds in real time. Their platform is an excellent fit for leveraging spatial data for operational decisions such as remote monitoring of assets, predictive maintenance, and process optimization. The team at Esri developed a use case of an intelligent charger and vehicle network to demonstrate the potential of their platform. However, to showcase its’ true potential, they would need data sources that would otherwise have to come from hardware or multiple data generation scripts. The key challenge here is that it is challenging to mock real-world data sources realistically at scale.
IoTIFY partnered with the team at Esri to create stateful device-twin models of popular electric vehicles (EVs) and charging stations. The vehicle models went into fine detail to mimic the behaviour of their real-world counterparts. For example, given the battery capacity of a particular EV, the battery level of an instance of the model would decrement depending on the distance that it has travelled. Furthermore, the models used the IoTIFY drive API that allows the simulated clients to mimic a vehicle driving across real roads at the average speed. Once the vehicle’s battery went below a certain threshold, the Esri Velocity platform would respond with coordinates to navigate to the nearest charger. The key benefit here is that the model could be used to spin up anywhere from 1 to 1 million+ clients and each of them would act independently, ie. with their own state and context.
With the support of IoTIFY, the team at Esri was able to demonstrate the use case developed on their platform by simulating several cars driving across Europe.
