Navantia integrates DRAGSA into Insights Hub to unify data and users across its industrial ecosystem
Company
Navantia, an international benchmark in shipbuilding and advanced engineering, sought to integrate the DRAGSA platform into the Siemens MindSphere ecosystem in order to unify users, operational data, and analytical processes within a highly structured industrial cloud environment.
The objective was to enable its teams to operate DRAGSA natively within MindSphere, leveraging its connectivity resources, IoT management, and security framework, while maintaining the full monitoring, analytics, and digitalization capabilities developed by Surcontrol.
Challenge
To adapt DRAGSA to operate in a fully integrated manner within MindSphere, an IoT platform that uses proprietary data models, a centralized authentication system, and a specific cloud-based storage architecture accessible only through proprietary REST APIs.
The main objective was to ensure that:
- DRAGSA could be deployed as a service within MindSphere.
- Monitoring, alarms, analytics, digital twin, and reporting modules would feed directly from data stored in the MindSphere database, without using InfluxDB or traditional database structures.
- The user experience would remain identical to the standard DRAGSA version, despite operating on a completely different backend.
Problem
- Non-conventional data model: MindSphere does not use traditional databases such as InfluxDB. Its IoT data is stored using proprietary structures accessible through REST services, requiring a complete reconstruction of DRAGSA’s acquisition, writing, and querying layers.
- Complex user integration: Identity and permission management had to be delegated to MindSphere’s native system, requiring adaptation of DRAGSA’s roles and authentication module.
- Heterogeneous protocols and high data volumes: The platform needed to process real-time industrial data, transform it, and serve it to DRAGSA’s internal modules without performance loss.
- REST API dependency for critical operations: From storage to streaming reads, all operations had to go through REST endpoints, requiring algorithm redesign and query optimization to prevent latency issues.
Solution
How we do it?
DRAGSA’s roles and permissions module was adapted to fully delegate authentication to MindSphere’s system, ensuring security, traceability, and fully unified access.
To guarantee compatibility and performance within the MindSphere environment, the following components were adjusted:
- The real-time monitoring module.
- The alarms and automated rules system.
- The digital twin engine and signal interpretation module.
Results
The integration enabled Navantia to operate DRAGSA natively within the MindSphere IoT environment, achieving:
- Advanced monitoring and analytics directly on MindSphere’s data infrastructure.
- Centralized user, access, and permission management without external configurations.
- Reduced latency in critical processes thanks to optimized algorithms and API calls.
- Full compatibility with DRAGSA modules, including alarms, digital twin, reporting, and predictive maintenance.
- A unified, secure, and scalable ecosystem for naval engineering projects.