All work
Industrial operations · Edge-to-application integration
Industrial Fuel Management & Edge Integration
Pulse-metered dispensing captured at the edge and reconciled against operational transactions.
Operational· pending verificationPublic summary — client anonymised
Publication draft: status, contribution and technical details require contributor approval. The architecture and implementation notes below are illustrative, not verified accounts of a client deployment.
Context & challenge
Fuel is a high-value consumable. Manual dispensing logs are slow to reconcile and easy to dispute, and site connectivity cannot be relied on.
Objectives
- Capture each dispense automatically at source
- Tie every dispense to a vehicle/operator and an authorised transaction
- Keep recording through network outages
Solution approach
- Flow-meter pulses counted on industrial PLC digital inputs and converted to calibrated volumes at the edge.
- Transactions buffered locally and published over MQTT when connectivity allows.
- Backend service validates, de-duplicates and persists transactions for reporting.
Architecture
- Flow meter
- PLC pulse input
- Edge logic
- Local buffer
- MQTT
- API
- Database
- Reports
Simplified and anonymised. No private infrastructure details are published.
Important technical decisions
- Edge-side calibration so raw pulses are never the system of record
- Idempotent transaction IDs to make re-sync safe
Operational considerations
- Meter calibration drift
- Power loss mid-dispense
- Store-and-forward during outages
Results
Results pending verification. We only publish outcomes that have been confirmed.
Lessons learned
- Design the reconciliation report first — it defines what the edge must capture.