Munich Airport is looking to connect, expand, and automate its existing energy monitoring system, currently taking meter readings for water and electricity consumption – across the terminal buildings, baggage areas, and hangars – over local-area wired and wireless networks, to its developing low-power wide-area (LPWA) MIOTY network.
The airport has over a thousand energy meters, including to measure “cold and heat quantities”, which currently connect via various different channels (“such as LAN and WLAN or wireless Mbus”), and periodically require manual maintenance and readouts – which is “time-consuming, labour-intensive, and costly”, according to a statement.
It has an existing MIOTY network, originally deployed in 2019 as part of a state-funded “future IoT” test network with the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, which has developed from a standing-start, with three base stations and a few test sensors, into a “production-ready system” with “stable radio coverage” indoors and outdoors.
This includes stable coverage in the first basement level of the airport, too, a press statement says. Stability, it might be noted, is the thing the MIOTY crowd are betting on, which will see the technology either complement or usurp the likes of LoRaWAN and NB-IoT, particularly in the industrial space.
There is no word on how many MIOTY gateways exist currently at Munich Airport, but the boiler-plate marketing states that “several hundred thousand sensors can be operated via MIOTY with just one base station”. Three-and-a-half million message can be delivered per base station per day, the blurb goes.
MIOTY (a portmanteau of MY IOT; stylised as ‘mioty’) is a relatively new challenger on the crowded low-power wide-area (LPWA) IoT block, emerging in 2018/19 to replace the Wireless Meter Bus (M-Bus) standard that has underpinned smart metering in Europe, as well as in certain markets in Asia and Latin America. MIOTY is only the go-to-market brand, in fact; it uses the ETSI-defined telegram-splitting ultra-narrowband (TS-UNB) specification.
The MIOTY network is already supporting a number of test cases in Munich. Around 70 IoT sensors have been deployed to achieve “more precise analysis of air conditioning systems in Terminal 1 and remote meter reading”, the story goes. At least one base station from Swissphone has been installed, as well, to enable data transmissions to the MIOTY sensors – to remotely adjust sampling rates in the sensors, for example.
The new MIOTY push is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, to the tune of €2 million over 36 months. The project, under the name SKAMO (Skalierbares Anlagenmonitoring, or Scalable System Monitoring), is geared to reduce “costs for… new digital services”, and therefore to reduce overall energy usage.
A statement said there is a “lack of coordination between isolated subsystems” in the airport, implying brand new IoT modules or retrofit-able IoT sensors are required. “In many buildings or properties at Munich Airport there are extensive energy systems consisting of producers of heat, cold and electricity or storage and consumers,’ it said.
“This can regularly lead to excessive energy consumption… This challenge should be solved with the rollout of the MIOTY technology.” The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, which helped MIOTY through standardisation in ETSI, is also engaged, along with German firm WEPTECH Elektronik and Norwegian energy specialist Volue.
The Fraunhofer Institute said: “The aim is to reduce the costs and barriers to entry for the introduction of digital services to optimise energy and load management through the use of IoT and AI. In this way, significant amounts of energy and CO2 emissions can be saved and costs can be saved at the same time.”
It added: “SKAMO’s goal is to keep the energy footprint as small as possible when introducing IoT systems. This is the only way to ensure that the savings achieved through the technology are not impaired or prevented by an inefficient implementation phase.”
