Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 2

Beacontree Technologies Inc. (BTI) located in Toronto Ontario was founded in 2005 to address Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) solutions. When smartphone/tablet manufactures adopted Near Field Communication (NFC) readers in their devices, BTI decided to branch out to pursue NFC technology for process industry. BTI has been assessing how RFID could be applied to Equipment Lock Out which provides a reality check for any type of inspection process using NFC technology including complex process industries like oil and gas, petro-chemicals, iron and steel and utilities. The technology ensures systems are properly shutdown prior to performing any maintenance on the unit which can be dangerous if shutdown is not performed properly.Lambton College partnered with BTI to develop the prototype and application called One-Touch Lock-Out (OTLO) and prove the concept. Due to the success of this initial project, BTI and Lambton College are collaborating again for the proposed project that will move the prototype beyond a ""stand-alone"" application to a fully integrated system with a second mobile application called One-Touch Inspection (OTI) that tracks operation and maintenance activities in real-time. To become fully integrated with key systems, the research team will establish an Application Programming Interface (API) structure which connects OTI and OTLO to process control systems.The research team will expand the integration structure to include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems since work orders and asset management are important components for managing the front end and back end of OTLO and OTI applications. One faculty researcher, 3 graduate student and 6 research students will work closely with BTI to develop the OTLO and OTI systems over three years.