How GE Digital is Modernising Industries
The definition of “modern industry” has seen monumental revisions over the decades. Today’s factories are being powered by advanced technology and intelligent software to cater to the rapid evolution in scientific and engineering disciplines. The sheer velocity of breakthroughs in modern disciplines – from aerospace to genetics – has compelled assembly lines to take up complex roles and finish production in a matter of weeks, days, or hours. Subsequently, assembly lines are becoming more autonomous and are requiring fewer workers than ever.
Automation, however, has its limits; and, to break those limits it must become intelligent. To this end, factory machines need to communicate with each other and learn from experience. Realising this, companies are utilising technologies such as machine learning, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and blockchain. These innovations – the true utility of which, until a few years ago, appeared only in laboratories and sci-fi documentaries – are now helping some of the largest organisations undertake projects that will have the greatest impact on our civilisation.
GE Digital – a subsidiary of General Electric (GE) – has been spearheading its own efforts to make its facilities smart and extending the efforts to its clients as well. It has been developing IIoT, or Industrial Internet, platforms that operate and manage the processes at GE’s industries, which includes Aviation, Chemicals, Healthcare, Mining, Power & Utility, and others. A renowned technology GE Digital owns and develops is the Predix Platform.
IoT in industry-use case is vastly different from the business- or consumer-use case, and necessitates the combination of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) for its deployment. According to a Forrester report, operations stakeholders (including factory and plant operations executives, facilities managers, and operations personnel) and IT executives should combine their focus on lowering costs, improving asset utilisation, and ensuring the technology solutions and architecture are secure, scalable, and aligned with existing corporate infrastructure, for a cumulative effect.
GE Digital’s IIoT Platform
This collaboration between OT and IT to produce a cumulative effect on business operations is achieved on GE Digital’s Predix. The Industrial IoT application platform, according to the official site, connects physical assets to powerful analytics and industrial applications to improve operations, lower costs, and develop and monetise new data-driven services. Predix uses physical devices to gather OT and IT data and uses technology such as analytics and machine learning, Big Data, security system, distributed intelligence, asset connectivity and management, and development environments to process that data for industrial application.
Some of the key requirements the platform fulfils for an industrial-grade application are:
1. Asset-Centricity
It builds an initial model of the physical assets (such as machines) of the facility and later expands to include assembly lines, factories, and industrial vehicles. It reports and initiates actions at the asset and sensor levels, and exploits asset knowledge as reusable machine learning.
2. Edge-to-Cloud
It spans from Edge to Cloud, supporting a variety of deployment options based on available hardware resources. The Edge and Cloud can be integrated together or used independently to optimise workload execution.
3. Distributed Architecture
The platform supports varying architectures, centralises Big Data processing in the Cloud to take advantage of compute and storage, and performs data analysis at the Edge to support latency and bandwidth constraints.
4. Data Fabric and Data Management
It ingests multi-terabyte streams of time-series data from assets located in harsh and distributed physical environments. It supports also Big Data processing frameworks such as Spark and deploys analytics to operational data in motion.
5. Insightful Analytics
The application platform reacts rapidly to incoming data. It explores and exploits historical data for insights and evolves asset-centric “digital twin” models.
Why Industries Need IIoT Platforms
Critical industries such as Aeronautics and Oil & Gas are unique as the talent required to solve these challenges is highly specialised. For instance, an engineer at an aerospace company is involved in designing gas turbines. They may be adept at designing and overhauling the engine’s overall chassis, turbine, and combustion chamber. However, the knowledge and skill, when not captured in a pervasive manner, cannot be utilised to scale and replicate the task.
An IIoT platform would allow the organisation to reuse the engineer’s knowledge and skill and extend it to new turbines. Therefore, having an application platform that is flexible, scalable, and reusable across a variety of use industrial-use cases is critical.
How Predix Works
As mentioned earlier, Predix Platform uses various technologies to accomplish its tasks:
Distributed Intelligence
Each station in an industry generates massive amounts of data; and converting it into meaningful data and extracting value from it at the right time and in the right place is the challenge that IIoT aims to tackle. GE Digital’s platform comprises two stacks or layers of architectures that work in tandem. Applications can use these layers to run workloads at the Edge, in the Cloud, or anywhere in between. This allows supervisors to connect to assets, extract data, perform analysis, and gather intelligence where it's needed and when it’s needed.
Asset-Centric ‘Digital Twins’
Predix Platform, according to GE, is asset centric. Digital Twins is a replica of physical assets that codifies information to reflect past conditions, current conditions, and future predictions on those assets. Industrial applications leverage this to produce data on maintenance and equipment health, operations optimisation, and predictive maintenance.
Analytics & Machine Learning
Predix Platform provides data science projects with an industrial-grade asset-centric analytics library and a framework to create machine learning analytics designed for intelligent decision making. Edge and Cloud-based analytics, when applied to IoT data streams, can track anomalies, direct prescriptive controls, signal predictive maintenance alerts, and more.
Industrial Data Fabric
Despite the fact that industrial data is growing twice as fast as any other sector every year, the majority of data resides in silos and remains largely untapped. GE Digital’s IIoT platform includes a data fabric built for industrial applications to ingest streaming/batch data.
This means the IIoT operator can apply analytic workloads using standard, in-memory, server-less runtime engines or a full range of structured or unstructured Big Data storage options.
Security
At the moment that data leaves an asset, ensuring its availability, validity, and integrity is of primary concern. Predix Platform has security systems built in every layer, which is continuously monitored. It addresses the security of the platform itself, the applications that it powers, the software development process, and the data that is processed in the platform. The IIoT platform provides two-party encryption, end-to-end chain-of-custody reporting for code and data, and other modes of security.
GE Digital’s IIoT Efforts in a Nutshell
A GE Remanufacturing Facility in Grove City, Pennsylvania, uses GE Digital’s IIoT platform to repair around 1,200 freight locomotives (engines) every year. The facility uses an array of connected software, devices, and sensors to understand how the engine ran, what caused the failure, and what repair it will need.
The software gathers all parameters, analyzes them thoroughly, and displays them on computer screens on the plant floor. Engineers and technicians on the site use the unit’s IoT capabilities to operate heavy tools and machinery, and control and monitor much of the remanufacturing process.
Around 96 stations in the facility report out in real-time and all the data is accessible in any section of the plant floor within a second. Besides making manufacturing facilities smart, Industrial Internet of Things also expedites industrial workflow, enhances safety of employees, reduces downtime and wastage, and keeps the environment clean.
GE Digital is driving one of the biggest digital transformations of the 21st century. The world is in the midst of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Industrial macrocosms are becoming smarter, more interconnected than ever. Industries including Aerospace, Automotive, Pharmaceuticals, and Healthcare are adopting futuristic technologies and methods such as machine learning, IIoT, Big Data, Cloud, Edge, and cognitive computing. And IoT, especially, is at the centre of the Revolution and to the digital transformation of manufacturing processes.