Christian Olt

Make or Buy in IIoT: Scaling Use Cases on One LoRaWAN Platform

The starting point is the LoRaWAN network at the CHEMPARK, with which Currenta Conneqtive first monitored its steam network and later pumps at the river waterworks. Rather than building its own IoT stack – with a development team, a requirements catalog and one to two years of lead time – Conneqtive relies on the akenza platform and can thus concentrate on sensors and use cases. A central point is the Device Type Library with over 400 pre-decoded devices: decoding new sensors, otherwise a recurring pain point, falls away with a single click. Murat Mutlu and Christian Olt walk through the path from the TWTG vibration sensor via Actility as the LoRaWAN network server to analysis in akenza – including FFT analyses, thresholds and alerting. What becomes clear: thresholds cover a large share of cases, whereas complex vibration patterns and AI models still require an expert. The real leverage lies in using an infrastructure, once built, as a shared medium for many further use cases – from single-room heating control to lubrication optimization. What you take away Anyone looking to scale IoT builds not individual use cases, but an infrastructure on which many use cases can be based. A pre-decoded device library removes the biggest effort in connecting new sensors – decoding – from the project. Thresholds solve a large share of predictive maintenance cases; complex vibration patterns still call for expert knowledge. Offered as Infrastructure and Software as a Service, savings, for example on heating costs, help finance the infrastructure. The biggest lesson learned came not in the software but in the field – from overly complex, overly engineering-driven solutions instead of pragmatic standards.