Advanced Asset Management Tools in Photovoltaic Plant Monitoring: UAV-Based Digital Mapping

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) plant monitoring and maintenance has become an often critical activity: the high efficiency requirements of the new European policy have often been in contrast with the many low-quality plants installed in several countries over the past few years. In actual industrial practices, heterogeneous information is produced, and they are often managed in a fragmented way. Several software tools have been developed for obtaining reliable and valuable information from the PV plant’s raw data. With the aim of gathering and managing all these data in a more complex and integrated manner, an information managing system is proposed in this work—it is composed of a structured database, called the Photovoltaic Indexed Database, and a user interface, called the Digital Map, that allows for easy access and completion of the information present in the database. This information managment system and PV plant digitalization process is able to analyze and properly index the IR in the database, as well as the visual images obtained in photovoltaic plant monitoring.