INTELLIGENT GREEN TECHNOLOGY
Getting more from
industrial assets
GE Power’s edge strategy is driving benefits for its installed
base of regional industrial users, explains Bhanu Shekhar.
I
ndustrial automation and artificial
intelligence have been associated
together since the 1940s. The
concept of applying artificial intelligence,
embedded in hardware and software,
into industrial and control systems for
the purpose of improving productivity as
well building modeling techniques is not
new. However, in the past, the marriage
of artificial intelligence and industrial
equipment has been hampered due to a
number of limitations.
This includes poor quality, over
structured, and disconnected streams
of data, often at too high speeds of
transmission. With slower network
speeds in the past, slower computing
systems as well, artificial intelligence-
based applications, were unable to cope
with the volumes of data from traditional
industrial systems.
Bhanu Shekhar, Chief Digital Officer,
GE Power Middle East and Africa, also
explains that high fidelity systems that
reconfigure asset values within a certain
range, to ensure optimum industrial
performance, have existed for the last thirty
years. But their ability to reconfigure assets
based on real-time data transmissions has
traditionally been very difficult.
Other than the compute and
networking device limitations within
traditional industrial systems, high fidelity
systems from each manufacturer were also
unable to talk to each other. Hence, each
asset was built to optimise itself based on
its range of operating parametres, and was
excluded from the operating conditions of
the overall industrial equipment or plant.
“Traditionally when the plant went live
it was using a range of OEM parameters
to perform. Industries have been built by
using traditional operational processes.
How to switch to different models of
operation recognising the inputs, existed
but not to such an extent. Multiple models
built by OEMs were not interacting
with each other. Now assets need to be
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