Company News

The energy management platform developed by Greatech for TCL Air Conditioner is another significant project in the energy sector. It enables visual monitoring and real-time query of operational parameters through configuration views, providing a complete digital energy management solution to optimize the factory's energy structure and reduce consumption. The project also received the TDengine 'Best Smart Manufacturing Practice' award.

01

Project Background

The TCL Air Conditioner Energy Management Platform is another key project by Greatech in the energy sector. TCL Air Conditioner's large-scale production combined with small-batch, multi-model manufacturing demands highly refined energy management, with strict requirements for electricity, water, natural gas, oil, and other metrics. For instance, data needs real-time collection and dynamic monitoring, with analysis across dimensions such as time, factory, workshop, production line type, production line, and equipment. This includes energy-saving measurement, billing, cost accounting, benchmarking against industry standards, and generating analytical reports. Through refined management, it maximizes energy conservation, monitors user energy safety data in real time, sends alerts to safety personnel, guides hazard management, and provides information services for TCL's energy safety and management.

02

Business Challenges

In the energy sector, data has the following characteristics:

1

Time-Series Data

Devices continuously generate data with timestamps reported to the platform.

2

Stable Data Flow

Reporting frequency is stable, with collection every 30 seconds.

3

Numerical Data

Data includes cumulative usage, voltage, current, pressure, etc.

4

Immutable Data

Data records meter readings at specific times and does not require updates or deletions.

5

Time and Space Dimension Aggregation

Time dimensions include year, month, week, day, hour, with statistics as frequent as every 15 minutes. Space dimensions range from factory, workshop, production line type, production line, to equipment.

6

Large Data Volume

With 40,000 meters per factory, data collected every 30 seconds results in over 100 million records per day.

For the energy industry, high real-time requirements, massive data volume, and complexity are current challenges. Analyzing, measuring, billing, and accounting for vast and complex data in real time is a critical difficulty to overcome.

03

Project Implementation

The G-Things Industrial IoT Platform by Greatech supports data collection, rule engine, data forwarding, command issuance, and data visualization, while providing open APIs for integration with third-party systems.
From the data types collected, the platform's device data and system operations exhibit the following time-series characteristics: ○ All collected data is time-series and structured. ○ Data sources for device collection points are unique. ○ Data has timeliness. ○ Write operations dominate, with read operations secondary. ○ Real-time calculations for statistics and aggregation are needed. ○ Queries typically specify time intervals. ○ High-frequency data access is supported.

Based on energy industry data characteristics, the Greatech project team evaluated OpenTSDB, ClickHouse, and TDengine as time-series database storage engines:

1

OpenTSDB

Relies on HBase, HDFS, and ZooKeeper, requiring high hardware resources and cost. Performance drops significantly with large time-span queries, and it has poor support for aggregation analysis.

2

ClickHouse

Meets all selection requirements for data storage, cross-time queries, and aggregation analysis, but has high operational costs, complex scaling, and resource-intensive usage.

3

TDengine

Meets needs for data storage and analysis queries, with open-source cluster support, horizontal scalability, and low resource usage, making it the optimal choice under limited resources.

After comparison, Greatech selected TDengine as the storage engine, incorporating it into the data collection process for database modeling. Leveraging TDengine's "one table per data collection point" and "super table" features, the team mapped business models to super tables and specific tables during data model design.

04

Project Deployment

To maximize cost reduction and efficiency, Greatech's G-Things IoT Platform helps users choose appropriate time-series data persistence solutions based on user type (lightweight, heavyweight, etc.), device scale, and data volume.
The TCL Air Conditioner Energy Management Platform has been running smoothly for six months since launch.
A significant outcome is the reduction in hardware resources used. Compared to an electronic industrial IoT platform using ClickHouse clusters with similar data scale, this project uses half the database servers.
Greatech's assistance enabled TCL to achieve visual monitoring and real-time query of operational parameters via configuration views, providing a complete digital energy management solution that improves operational decision-making efficiency. Through analysis of electricity, water, oil, and natural gas usage, energy consumption was reduced by about 5%, saving TCL tens of millions of yuan annually.
Recently, Greatech's TCL Air Conditioner Energy Management Platform project received the TDengine 'Best Smart Manufacturing Practice' award in the officially announced 'TDengine 2021 Best Case Awards'.