Call-Out Management for Industry 4.0

Client

Key Activities

Industry

How MAC Automation helped a leading oil and gas producer deliver reliable call-outs to their operator’s mobile phones. 

Problem:  Cell phone providers randomly disallow call-out alarms via email to SMS, making it difficult for operators to receive timely alerts.

Our oil and gas producer client wanted to send alarm notifications and receive alarm acknowledgement from its field operations using SMS notifications to make it easier for operators to respond and optimize in real-time.

However, randomly and out of the blue, cellular network providers will suddenly treat the operator email associated with the CygNet GNS as a “SPAMMER”. This results in the operators no longer receiving the texts until hours after they are sent, or worse never receiving them.

A quick fix appears to be changing the email associated with the GNS sender but that will sometimes only work for a few days before the same blocking or delaying of emails results again from the mobility providers. As a result, call-out alarms are unreliable.

Solution: Integrate Twilio cloud notification service with your CygNet HMI system to allow for reliable and timely notifications to be sent to users.

By integrating Twilio with a CygNet HMI system, SMS notifications can be reliably sent to field operators and other users, bypassing any cellular network provider restrictions.

Project Objectives:

● Allow CygNet to send out SMS notifications to users.
● Allow users to acknowledge the Cygnet notifications via SMS.

Project Execution:

Create a CygNet GNS plugin allowing CygNet to send any user notifications to Twilio and then to the end users via SMS. Create a custom REST API to allow the user to acknowledge notification via SMS which is then picked up by Twilio, sent to the REST API allowing CygNet to acknowledge the notification.

Step 1: Create a Twilio plugin to be used by the CygNet GNS service.

Create and install a custom CygNet plugin to allow CygNet to send user notifications to the Twilio cloud service for distribution to end users.

Step 2: Configure CygNet GNS users and events to use the Twilio service.

Configure the Cygnet GNS service users and groups to use the new Twilio plugin, configure the PIN manager for each user if alarm acknowledgement is required.

Step 3: Configure the Twilio cloud service.

Configure the Twilio cloud service to enable a webhook to call the SMS-Receiver running on the CygNet GNS server when a reply to a notification is receive, allowing users to acknowledge notifications via SMS.

Step 4: Create SMS Receiver REST API to receive acknowledgment messages.

Create and deploy a custom REST API to run on the GNS server, listening, validating and processing end user notification acknowledgement replies.

Register your Twilio phone number to allow messages to be sent to users in the United States.

Note: A2P 10DLC registration required for SMS messaging from Twilio to US phone numbers.

Outcome:

The benefit of using the Twilio cloud service for SMS notifications to operations is that it allows reliable notifications to be sent out to operations while not being effected by any change of policies or processes implemented by the cellular network providers.

Technologies Deployed

Team

Meet the MAC automation, SCADA and electrical engineers that executed this project:

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