Make Kepware Smarter with Crosser

Kepware is one of the leaders in industrial connectivity, by providing drivers for almost any type of machine-level protocol. Their KEPServerEX product is currently in use in many places all over the world to get access to machine data through a common interface.

The main use case is to collect data from machines and deliver it to centralized platforms for analysis, such as PTC’s own ThingWorx, local historians or other similar solutions. But what if you want to take action on your data already on the factory floor or close to the machines generating the data?
This is where Crosser comes in.

By complementing your existing KEPServerEX installation with Crosser Edge Analytics software you can easily implement different local use cases, such as:

Machine-to-machine communication Anomaly detection:

• Analyse data from your machines using smart algorithms or machine learning to detect anomalies and take some action, like stopping a machine before it breaks or notify an on-site engineer.
• Process optimization: Analyse data from one part of your process line and use algorithms to derive optimised settings for another part of the process line.
• Low latency processing: For any type of latency sensitive operation local processing is the only choice

Derive valuable insights:

• Instead of sending the raw data to the cloud for analysis you can analyse the data close to the machines to derive valuable insights and only deliver these to your on-premise or cloud based business systems. In doing this you will save both bandwidth and cost for cloud services.

Deliver your machine data or insights to other services:

• Crosser Edge Analytics comes with its own extensive library of connectors that you can use both to get access to non-machine data and to deliver the results of your local processing to a plethora of on-premise systems and cloud services. You can for example send data to your ERP system or notify an engineer by using an SMS service.

Make your KEPServerEX installation smarter by adding Crosser Edge Analytics!

Crosser Edge Analytics

The Crosser Edge Analytics is a generic software platform that can be configured for different types of processing by connecting pre-built modules into flows using a visual design tool. In addition to using the pre-built modules you can also run your own code (Python and C#) in code modules, or write your own custom modules using our SDK. This gives you great flexibility in implementing the logic you need.

The Edge node is installed as a Docker container and can hence run anywhere where Docker is supported, in the machines, in a gateway or on a local server/virtual machine. The container is installed once and you can then easily configure it for different types of processing using the tools in the Crosser Cloud service.

Example machine-to-machine flow built in the Crosser Flow Studio

Crosser Cloud

The Crosser Cloud service gives you a centralized place to manage all your processing flows and edge nodes. Crosser Cloud is hosted by Crosser or deployed on your premises if needed. The visual design tool for creating process flows, called the Flow Studio, is one of the tools available in Crosser Cloud. This is a drag’n drop tool for quickly building process flows, from simple condition logic to advanced processing using your custom-made machine learning models.

In addition to designing your process flows you also need to control where and when to run these flows. This is the task of the Edge Director. The Edge Director helps you deploy your flows onto distributed Edge nodes. You can easily deploy a flow to a single node or a group of nodes with a single operation, using a flexible grouping scheme. Control what is running where and when upgrades are done by version control of all your flows. Finally, the Edge Director also monitors all your nodes to ensure proper operation and give you a live status view. The Crosser Cloud is a pure configuration and monitoring service. No machine data is sent there and once a flow has been deployed onto an edge node, processing runs autonomously and there are no dependencies on the cloud service.

In summary, the Crosser Edge Streaming Analytics solution is a pre-packaged solution for industrial IoT applications that provides great flexibility in terms of connectivity and processing options, while still being easy to use with minimal life-cycle costs.

Recommended reading

Crosser Edge Analytics Platform →

Schedule a Demo to learn more about the Crosser Platform →