Daikin uses AWS to build remote monitoring and predictive maintenance system

About Daikin

Daikin is a leading innovator and worldwide provider of advanced, high-quality air conditioning, heating, and refrigeration solutions for residential, commercial and industrial applications. They are committed to elevating the quality of air in homes, businesses, and public spaces with a complete line of energy-efficient and intelligent products. As a global leader in HVAC&R applications, they strive to leverage the insights and innovations of Daikin worldwide to create better indoor environments across North America.

Need for remote monitoring and predictive maintenance

Independent studies state that HVAC systems contribute around 40 percent of the energy consumption in a typical commercial facility. The efficient operation and proper maintenance of the HVAC systems are priorities for facility managers. In most cases, HVAC maintenance is reactive. In a scenario where there is a failure to an HVAC system, the technician has to identify what has led to the failure and carry out the maintenance accordingly. In this approach, detecting the failure and sending a notification to the maintenance team takes time. Identifying the root cause of the problem can require a lot of effort and extend the system’s downtime.

Daikin offers a remote monitoring service

Daikin realized they needed to enable their customers to monitor their HVAC systems more effectively to predict and reduce downtime. Daikin HERO Cloud Services is a remote monitoring platform for Daikin HVAC systems. Daikin’s HERO Simple Edge device connects to the outdoor unit and has a built-in SIM card to provide wireless connectivity. The HERO Simple Edge device communicates with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service, AWS IoT Core, and sends real-time telemetry data to AWS.

Figure 1: Daikin HERO Cloud Service

It provides intuitive and insightful visualization data of connected indoor and outdoor HVAC units. For example, the outdoor and indoor units’ refrigerant flow animation provides operational references that are not readily available to the technician even if he/she is by the side of the HVAC system.

Figure 2 Real-time Refrigerant Animation

Daikin HERO Cloud Services also includes failure prediction for the compressors and sensors and refrigerant leak detection of the system. In some cases, it can help optimize the equipment‘s operation based on outdoor ambient temperatures.

Figure 3: Site Access and Map View

Architecture – how it works

1. A Daikin HERO Simple Edge device is connected to the outdoor unit of the HVAC system that collects telemetry data from the HVAC units and sends it to the AWS cloud.
2. The telemetry data is ingested to AWS IoT Core, and sent to multiple destinations for storage and consumption by downstream applications.
3. Daikin uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store telemetry data, uses AWS Lambda to perform transformations, and then stores the data on Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).
4. End users can visualize data using a Web API interface that uses Amazon API Gateway.

Figure 4: Daikin HERO Reference Architecture

This architecture allows Daikin to store, process and analyze telemetry data from HVAC units at scale. As a result, they have been able visualize system operation and proactivity identify failures to reduce downtime for their customers.

Looking ahead

Daikin is currently deploying Daikin VRV systems connected to the HERO Cloud. These services are offered as 1 year, 3 year or 5 year licensing agreements. Licensed customers have an operational dashboard for their sites. The HERO Simple Edge device and cloud application showcase how AWS IoT, database, storage, notification, and machine learning services can be integrated to create a new business offering for Daikin.

With the growing business and established data platform in AWS, the Daikin HERO team and AWS team are focusing on:

• Scaling up – As the number of users and service consumption increase, there are challenges and opportunities for cost and performance optimization.
• Operation tuning – Using Daikin’s proprietary algorithm to keep units operating at optimal condition to save energy without sacrificing user experience.
• Engineering and design – Analytics based on AWS services can help identify improvements to the component or hardware design of the unit.
• Integration – Synergy with other smart product offerings by Daikin on AWS.