IoT Prototype with Business Rules and Workflow – Blog Series 1/4

Hello Everyone,

I am Sharadha Krishnamoorthy and I work for Invenio Business Solutions, in the UK. I have worked on several technical areas of SAP such as SAP NetWeaver Portal and SAP Process Infrastructure(PO/PI)  in the past 13 years. Currently my role is to research the new and upcoming technologies in SAP and create POCs/prototypes for our customers.

This is the first blog in a series which will guide you through the steps to design an IoT prototype using some of the powerful services offered by SAP Cloud Platform (Neo). The prototype I have designed is a preliminary prototype for the manufacturing domain. You can create advanced IoT prototypes using the same set of tools (and more) for any industry domain.

The diagram(authored by me) below gives an overview of the scenarios which this blog series will cover.

I have used the following services of SAP Cloud Platform (Neo). You do not have to pay for any service used in these blogs – they come with the trial version of SCP Neo edition.

• SAP Cloud platform Internet of Things for the Neo environment –  Device management, send/receive data from devices through HTTP.
• Java application deployed in SAP Cloud Platform – Connects IoT services with Business Rules and Workflow services.
• SAP Cloud Platform Business Rules – Define business rules to manage the actions depending on the incoming IoT data.
• SAP Cloud Platform Workflow – Automate the business process for the collected IoT data.

All these services are very intuitive and extremely easy to design, develop and integrated with other services.

If you are planning to design the entire prototype described, you would require the following along with the trial version of SCP(Neo):

• Raspberry Pi
• Temperature and Humidity sensor
• A few buttons and LEDs

Note that I am not covering the setting up of Raspberry Pi with the sensors and buttons but will provide the code that I have used to capture and send the data to SCP. There is loads of help available over the internet to set up the Raspberry Pi3 and it is pretty simple.

An IoT enabled manufacturing organisation comprises of products, processes and people that are connected together. This blog series will give you an idea of how various services provided by SAP Cloud Platform can be used to connect people and processes with the devices to take informed decisions in real-time.

The blog series will cover three simple scenarios.

Part 2.1: Remote temperature and humidity control.

Part 2.2: Remote temperature and humidity control (Continued..)

Part 3: Automated re-ordering based on stock level.

Part 4: Controlling the manufacturing process in real time.

These scenarios are made more simple in comparison to the real world scenarios but will give you an idea about how the various services in the SAP Cloud Platform can be integrated for an end-to-end IoT application. You can modify or enhance the scenario depending on what you are designing.

See you in the next blog with detailed steps for configuring the first scenario.