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FORNY20-FORNY2020

STUD: Techforgood AS, PolarEdge - An open IoT Edge Platform fast-tracks your connected operations

Alternative title: STUD: Techforgood AS, PolarEdge - En åpen IoT Edge-plattform sporer dine tilkoblede operasjoner

Awarded: NOK 1.00 mill.

Project Manager:

Project Number:

327472

Project Period:

2021 - 2023

Funding received from:

In the coming sustainable and digital society, emerging services in smart cities, smart agriculture, and smart energy bring large amounts of connected devices, requiring large volumes of data transmission and low latency. To tackle the challenges, edge computing becomes a promising answer. Edge computing is a natural extension of cloud computing, which features fast decision-making, low bandwidth, and offline maintenance. The PolarEdge project is developing an open IoT Edge platform that provides platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which can be deployed to various IoT edge scenarios (e.g., factory floor, building, logistics, and field assets), enable connection to massive IoT protocols (sensors and actuators), and run on custom hardware such as IoT gateways and embedded PCs, regardless of the heterogeneous architectures.The open edge platform provides the runtime for custom edge applications that are developed using cloud-native philosophy, i.e., applications are modulated into microservices to guarantee light footprint, maintainability, and scalability. Through a single panel exposed by the edge platform, customers are able to deploy custom applications into distributed edge devices in a scalable manner and perform monitoring, control, and artificial intelligence tasks through the same panel. In this project the initial PolarEdge product is developed and and tested with innovative customers. PolarEdge is currently supported by RCN and Innovation Norway and engaging with our pilot customers Eljun AB in renewable energy sector, and Vertical Plants System AB in smart plant wall systems. Eljun AB initially would like to have an Edge platform for managing their EV charging facilities first and then extend to other facilities, with additional functions like EdgeAI. Vertical Plants System AB would like to start with a pilot to replace their property solutions (Azure) with our open edge PaaS solutions to have more flexibility and privacy.

The PolarEdge platform is intended to create a fundamental value for the industry by providing a cloud-native designed edge solution for traditional industry sectors to accomplish digital transformation. During this procedure, the cost of development and operation is to be dramatically reduced and the risk of failure in solution development is combated, which shortens the time-to-market in practice. The openness nature of the platform helps SMEs to get rid of vendor lock-in constraints. The launch of PolarEdge is in line with Norway’s firm commitment to the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development by contributing to several UN sustainable development goals (SDG). PolarEdge drives the proliferation of edge computing in various industry verticals such as energy, agriculture and smart city so as to directly promote sustainable industrialisation in traditional industries and foster innovations for SMEs, which is the basis for sustainable economic growth and highlighted by SDG 9.

Funding scheme:

FORNY20-FORNY2020