An enterprise service bus (ESB) and Google gadget-based micro-injection moulding process monitoring system

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been used in various industrial monitoring applications, with the latest trend being their integration with other devices into the "Internet of Things" (IoT) vision, in which millions of devices will be interconnected online. One industrial environment which still has not had much exposure to WSNs and the IoT is the plastics industry environment, particularly injection moulding (IM), micro-injection moulding (µIM) and extrusion. A novel approach is presented for monitoring a typical plastics industry environment based on three major technologies: WSN, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Google Gadgets (GG). This is applied to a heterogeneous network of WSN nodes and National Instruments (NI) high-speed data acquisition devices. The SOA (which is the de-facto solution in enterprise-IT systems) enables IT resources (such as specific departmental applications, business partners, business processes and systems) to be accessed as a service, hence allowing seamless interoperability. The speaker describes the architectural design, system integration and user interfaces for a prototype system developed for the Centre for Polymer Micro- and Nano-Technology (MNT) at the University of Bradford which makes use of the WSO2 Carbon Platform's Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and the GG API.