Concepts

Predictive FLOWBOX® device

Name of the physical device deployed on your building water network.

It's also known as FLOWBOX®.

Device mainly contains:

• A normally open solenoid valve
• A turbine flowmeter
• A temperature sensor
• A card with custom hardware and software in charge of managing the other components. It sends metrics to the Predictive FLOWBOX® Application (Water consumption, Water temperature, FLOWBOX® internal metrics, etc.) and receives orders from the Predictive FLOWBOX® Application (opening/closing the valve, upgrading the firmware of the card, etc.)

Predictive FLOWBOX® Application

This is the business application that enables the interaction with the Predictive FLOWBOX® devices, this application is exclusively made for the users of the Predictive FLOWBOX® service.

Depending on the roles granted to the users, it aims to:

• Manage users, sites, buildings, zones and Predictive FLOWBOX® devices associated to a given customer
• Access to water consumption information and compare values between different time periods
• Schedule automatic opening/closing of the solenoid valve
• Open and close the solenoid valve
• Etc.

The Predictive FLOWBOX® Application consists in two elements:

• Predictive FLOWBOX® Core: core of the system
• Predictive FLOWBOX® WebApp and Mobile App: presentation layer to be used by end users

Predictive FLOWBOX® Core

Main component of the Predictive FLOWBOX® Application.

Il handles/coordinates all the elements and the business logic of the Predictive FLOWBOX® Application.

In ingests all the information sent by the Predictive FLOWBOX® devices and sends back orders to them via a MQTT layer.

It exposes an API used by the Predictive FLOWBOX® WebApp and the Predictive FLOWBOX® Mobile App.

Predictive FLOWBOX® WebApp

It’s the Web Application to be used by the client through a browser. It allows to manage a Predictive FLOWBOX® solution on a daily basis (access to water consumption, system management, etc.).

Predictive FLOWBOX® Mobile App

It’s the Mobile Application to be used by the client through a smartphone or tablet. It allows to manage a Predictive FLOWBOX® solution on a daily basis (access to water consumption, system management, etc.).

We chose to distribute this mobile application as a PWA (Progressive Web Apps). No need to open your application store to install the application. Just go to the Predictive FLOWBOX® WebApp and install it.

MQTT

MQTT Broker

A MQTT broker is a message broker. It’s a server which handles sending and receiving messages between the Predictive FLOWBOX® Devices and the Predictive FLOWBOX® Core. Messages are stored in « MQTT topics »

MQTT Topic

A MQTT topic is a « mail box » where MQTT clients (Predictive FLOWBOX® Core and Predictive FLOWBOX® Devices) will send messages to or get messages from.

Reverse Proxy

Network or software component which sits in front of applications and send traffic from browsers to these applications and vice versa. Reverse proxies help increase scalability, performance, resilience and security. It can provide SSL/TLS termination to encrypt the trafic between the browser and the application.