Design and Implementation of a Module Framework for Sensor Data Management

With the rapid emergence and spread of the Internet of Things, traditional businesses face new challenges to stay competitive and adapt to the new technologies and market trends in a quickly changing technological environment. The customers’ expectations rise, new products must use the newest available technology, they must be connected to everything and reach- able from everywhere in a mobile first way. The pressure on the businesses forces them to reinvent themselves to stay in the market.

One company currently involved in adapting its product lineup to comply with these market trends is General Acoustics e.K. (GA) located in Kiel, Germany. GA is a leading-edge technology producer of special echo sounders, water level and wave sensors as well as flow measuring systems. The current business model concentrates on the hardware side where data acquisition happens. Based on customer wishes, the measuring systems can be enhanced by custom solutions providing data processing and data presentation steps. Recent growth of GA and additional expectations by the customers mentioned above, made it difficult to develop separate solutions for each customer. A development project was initiated, its goal is the development of new versions of the core products. A data handling workflow concept has been created. It structures data acquisition, data processing, data storage, and data presentation functionality into sub-functionalities in a modular and configurable way. The workflow concept provides guidance for a unified development of the new product versions. The LOG_aLevel system from GA is the first product that will be refreshed based on the concept.
The work of this thesis is done in cooperation with GA and is meant as a contribution to their development project.

The intention of this thesis is the development of a LOG_aLevel 2.0 prototype. A module framework has to be designed and implemented, which carries the ideas of the modular workflow concept over to the software architecture. Further on, the LOG_aLevel prototype has to cover the core functionalities of the workflow and has to be based on that module framework.