Remote Monitoring of Heavy-duty Equipment for Predictive Control

– The Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is considered the backbone of many mobile machines. It is connected to and communicates with every single Electronic Controller Unit (ECU) in the vehicle via CAN data frames. With modern technology, the demand for effectively utilizing this vital system can heavily reduce costs for all vehicle industries, while improving safety. Tracking each vehicle’s ECU status such as motor speed, fuel consumption, and engine temperature, while logging and analyzing the data could help in monitoring and ultimately predicting vehicle failures before they happen. Building upon the CAN bus architecture, this paper presents a systematic approach that employs the J1939 protocol, to form a high layer protocol to log and parse data from the bus using the industry-standard Media Descriptor File (MDF) file format and utilizing an Internet of Things (IoT) device in addition to cloud computing. The proposed system was implemented and tested on a heavy-duty industrial snowblower as used in airports. This new system is being used in two industrial companies because of its early promising results.