CNIMI RTLS Showcase Case Study
Living lab of complementary location solutions for manufacturing.
The TL;DR
The CNIMI, a manufacturing productivity centre of excellence, partnered with reelyActive to create a showcase of real-time location technologies in their state of the art facility. The unique combination of reelyActive's open source IoT middleware, expertise and impartial guidance enabled the CNIMI to develop and maintain a unified showcase of multiple complementary technologies to advise manufacturers looking to adopt location solutions.
Making Sense of Real-Time Location
The real-time location of assets and personnel is a challenge across the industry, and manufacturers will often ask the CNIMI for advice on technical solutions. Which solution is best? The answer: it depends. By creating a living lab of complementary location solutions, the CNIMI is in a much better position (pun intended) to assist manufacturers in a comparative analysis, including testing in a realistic manufacturing environment.
Infrastructure-as-an-Opportunity
Opened in 2022, the CNIMI is a modern facility equipped from the outset with real-time location infrastructure, including:
- HPE Aruba Networking access points
(Bluetooth Low Energy RTLS) - Siemens Simatic RTLS
(Ultra-Wideband RTLS) - RF Controls Smart Antennas
(RAIN RFID RTLS)
Additional RTLS-capable infrastructure, including LoRaWAN and 5G, is a recent addition. This extensive collection of infrastructure presented an opportunity to showcase the complementary technologies side-by-side, especially since reelyActive's Pareto Anywhere open source middleware already supported two of the three hardware vendors out-of-the-box.
Data Destination: ThingsBoard
In order to compare location solutions on a level playing field, the CNIMI needed to select a platform with which to store and visualise the standardised real-time location data from Pareto Anywhere. With reelyActive's impartial guidance, after evaluating multiple options, the CNIMI selected ThingsBoard for the following reasons:
- its ability to display real-time location on a floorplan
- its high level of configurability
- its open source model*
- its ability to run on a local server
- its manageable learning curve
The CNIMI configured Pareto Anywhere to forward standardised real-time location data to ThingsBoard via MQTT.
* ThingsBoard's licensing model changed from the permissive Apache 2.0 license to the constrained Business Source License in v4.4 (2026).
Making Sense of the Solution
The CNIMI had in hand RTLS-capable infrastructure and local computing resources on which to store and present the data. All they needed was an integration of these parts into an interoperable solution, which could serve as a platform for future IoT/RTLS initiatives. And that's where reelyActive came in:
- our Pareto Anywhere open source IoT middleware readily "glued" together the parts
- our guidance and expertise expedited the development and deployment timeline
To complete the solution, reelyActive developed with CNIMI the barnowl-simatic module to integrate the Siemens Simatic RTLS with Pareto Anywhere.
Beyond the Traditional Partner Relationship
By working closely together since the opening of the CNIMI, a mutually-beneficial partnership has been established with reelyActive gaining access to an ideal test and development environment, and the CNIMI able to not only support, but continuously evolve, their world-class real-time location showcase. Moreover, as Pareto Anywhere IoT/RTLS middleware is open source and free of cost to use, the result is a partnership motivated by purpose rather than business economics.
Outcomes
Working together, the CNIMI and reelyActive have created one of the truly unique, vendor-neutral, unified RTLS showcases on the planet, for the benefit of regional manufacturers.
- CNIMI
- Québec
- Launched 2024
