Overview
I competed as a global finalist in Siemens #KicksForEdge, a 72-hour hackathon held at Munich Urban Colab. The event was part of IPCEI-CIS, advancing interoperable cloud–edge technologies.
What we built
Hidden faults were buried inside raw PLC logs even when the system reported “OK”. Over 72 hours, we built an edge-based log analytics pipeline to convert unstructured logs into actionable technician insights. Warehouse technicians manually sift through millions of log lines across dozens of PLCs. Unflagged errors cause conveyor arms to misroute packages without triggering alarms. These “silent” failures accumulate into enormous financial loss. Our research showed that Germany alone reported 44,406 operational complaints in 2024 related to delayed/misdirected parcels. (Source included in slide deck)
Hackathon tracks (3)
- Challenge 1 — Edge-enabled data analysis (Element Logic Germany)
- Challenge 2 — Hydropower predictive maintenance (LEW Wasserkraft)
- Challenge 3 — Robot QC from sensor data (HOLZ automation)
Industrial Edge device
[12:14:03.112] 'Logger 3 "UNIT-A" (192.168.1.50:5000)' connected!
[12:14:03.129] [COM RECV] RECV STATUS 16#7001
[12:14:03.145] [COM FILL] 01|CV|000101|N|FL|000000//0000|...
[12:14:03.169] [COM RECV] CV|02|000000|A|5|000002//...|SR|...
[12:14:03.332] [COM RECV] CV|02|000000|R|30|000000//...|SR|...
[12:14:03.387] FIFO warning: buffer usage 85%Our Solution
We built a full pipeline using Node-RED → OpenSearch → Dashboards.
- Automated log ingestion for text/ZIP PLC logs
- Custom parser that cleans, extracts, and formats raw strings into JSON
- Device, alarm, and routing analysis to identify common failure clusters
- Interactive dashboards for non-engineers to visualize trends instantly
Upload PLC logs (TXT/ZIP) for processing.
Clean + parse raw strings into structured JSON.
Searchable insights + trend views for technicians.
Future Vision
With a unified dataset, the next step is applying Edge AI models to detect anomalies before they become misdirection events. A chatbot interface over OpenSearch gives technicians instant, conversational access to system history and root-cause explanations.
.jpg)