Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of AWS IoT SiteWise, a managed service that collects data from the plant floor, structures and labels the data and generates real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) to help industrial customers make data-driven decisions, the company reported on Thursday. 

“With SiteWise, industrial customers can now use the power of AWS to collect, organize, and monitor their industrial equipment data at scale. SiteWise will help industrial customers move beyond data collection and enable them to visualize and monitor all their equipment, so they can focus on their main job of optimizing their operations,” said Dirk Didascalou, vice president of IoT, AWS.

AWS SiteWise will monitor operations across facilities, compute industrial performance metrics, create applications that analyze industrial equipment data to prevent costly equipment issues and reduce gaps in production. 

The solution will enable customers to collect data consistently across devices, identify issues with remote monitoring more quickly and improve multi-site processes with centralized data. SiteWise will simplify data collection from the plant floor, structure and label the data and generate real-time metrics. 

SiteWise will automatically compute customers’ metrics at the interval defined by the user. All uploaded data and computed metrics are sent to a fully managed time series database, which is designed to store and retrieve time-stamped data with low latency, making it significantly easier for customers to analyze equipment performance over time. 

In addition, customers will be able to create custom web applications to visualize metrics across end-user devices in near real-time to help users monitor equipment performance on web-enabled desktops, tablets or phones to identify anomalies, help reduce waste, make faster decisions and optimize plant performance.

SiteWise will also provide interfaces for collecting data from modern industrial applications through MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messages or its Application Programming Interface (APIs). One of AWS’ customers, Volkswagen Group, has been developing the Volkswagen Industrial Cloud to further improve the efficiency of its manufacturing and logistics processes. 

“With SiteWise we are able to easily ingest manufacturing shop floor data into the cloud, model and organize those different machine assets within our plants, and then visualize operational data from our cylinder production line in a web application," said Dr. Roy Sauer, director Enterprise & Platform Architecture, Volkswagen Group.

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan and Spain. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.

Officials of the Export-Import Bank of the United States said they are extending help to U.S. space companies facing competition from firms backed by the Chinese government, SpaceNews reported Thursday.

David Trulio, a senior vice president at Ex-Im, said the bank has received a congressional mandate to offer help to the space industry and exporters through the Program on China and Transformational Exports.

‘It’s a crucial mandate that we’re working to operationalize,” Trulio said Thursday at a virtual forum.

The Ex-Im program offers loans to foreign entities buying U.S. goods and services and Congress directed the bank to earmark at least 20 percent, or approximately $27 billion, of its financing authority for the program.

Judith Pryor, board member of Ex-Im, said the bank, which had offered $5 billion worth of loans to U.S. satellite and launch services buyers 10 years before it lost its congressional authorization, has “seen an uptick in non-geostationary satellite requests.”

Those include the rising demand for funding for low-Earth orbit satellites used for remote sensing and Earth observation missions and for in-orbit servicing.

Lt. Gen. Warren Berry, deputy chief of staff for logistics, engineering and force protection at the U.S. Air Force, said the service is looking at the U.S. Army’s Future Vertical Lift program as an option to meet the need for carrying out agile airlift operations in a time of war, Defense News reported Thursday.

“That’s something that we’ll certainly look at, but we know that we need to do lift in a different way,” Berry said of the FVL program at a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies-hosted event Thursday.

Another option Berry mentioned is Agility Prime, an initiative that seeks to explore the capability of “flying cars” that could be used to transport troops and perform logistics and search-and-rescue missions. He said the Air Force is working with the joint counter-small unmanned aircraft systems office led by the Army to protect U.S. military bases from small drones.

“That’s going to be a demand signal on this force moving forward that we’re going to have to really think through and make sure that we have them [airmen] resourced appropriately to execute that part of the air base air defense mission as well,” Berry added.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has established mobile emergency response support units to ensure the availability of multiple communications systems for disaster response, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

The units operate under FEMA’s Disaster Emergency Communications segment and deploy vehicles that house various radio equipment, microwave systems for data transmission and satellite systems for video, data and voice communications.

“We are constantly monitoring chat software and collaboration software to ensure that we are producing consistent messaging. And the information flows both ways,” said Steve Goldstein, liaison of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to FEMA, in an interview with the publication.

Goldstein’s comments come after FEMA released its 2018-2022 strategic plan which details the agency's need for “redundant communication systems” to ensure uninterrupted transmission in disaster scenarios.

“There are inherent risks to relying heavily on these communications systems. We must understand their interdependencies and the potential cascading impacts that a failure could cause,” the plan states. “FEMA must work with our partners to assess the mission impacts of losing the ability to reliably communicate and prioritize meeting all-hazards communications needs.”