Wood Moisture Control empowered by Low-Code: OutSystems by example, a practical setup in Industrial Environment

This document explores the research and development efforts undertaken as part of a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, focusing on creating an intelligent control system for natural wood drying processes in wood processing factories. This method, known for lower labor and energy costs, faces challenges with slower and unstable drying cycles. The project aims to enhance control over the drying process by monitoring and recording humidity levels in wood stacks, incorporating predictions based on weather forecasting data. The proposed solution results in the development of a three-layer system composed of data collection, relay, and analysis. This paper will focus on the last layer, working as the back-end and developed with OutSystems, which provides management capabilities over stacks, sensors, overall data, and analytical functions. OutSystems is a low-code development designed to enable rapid application development. It provides a way to build applications quickly, with minimal hand-coding, and with a focus on rapid prototyping, providing quick development, and deployment. As a result, we can provide accurate insights into the humidity levels, triggering alerts over any anomaly during the process, reducing the need for constant on-site supervision, optimizing work efficiency, reducing costs, and removing repetitive work while creating robust and scalable web applications with a focus on ease of use. In order to demonstrate the integration of this layer with the remainder of the architectural framework, this paper also presents a lockout over the usage of a REST API, which is employed to facilitate integration with the relay layer.