Sistemas de comunicación empleados en la gestión de la energía en industrias agroalimentarias

Résumé

Currently there is no doubt of the importance of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), and their use extends from education and entertainment to the industry or research. One of the greatest potential uses of ICTs is to collect real time information of everything is happening. In the food industry (FI) there is a real need of getting information about the state of the systems continuously (energy total consumption, lightning consumption, etc.), in order to have a more flexible management capability. Therefore, it seems obvious the need of using ICTs in this field. Traditionally, in FI, the information of interest is collected by hand, people recording data, and storing them in registers and stores files. Later, these files are computerized, to enable a faster storage and data analysis. Even today, there are FI systems that are able to store the information of interest, for later data dump on a main storage system. However, to be competitive in FI, it is often necessary to have the information available in real time in the main system. Today, ICTs enable communication between different systems of a food company (e.g. cold storage system, air conditioner equipment, etc.) and its main computer. Even if any of them has any problem to communicate directly with the central entity, external elements (sensors, controllers, etc.) could be added to these systems for temporally saving the data. The goal of this work is to use ICTs with different purposes: to allow communication among different systems working in a food company and to monitor them for collecting data of interest in order to manage and improve the energy efficiency of the company. To carry out this work specific hardware and software must be used (Remote, SCADA, communication cards, sensors and communication systems)