Reduce maintenance costs and improve factory safety and operations possible with Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance Testbed (Image courtesy of National Instruments).
Thanks to a partnership between IBM, National Instruments (NI) and SparkCognition, the Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance Testbed promises to reduce maintenance costs and improve operations and safety.
This all might sound familiar to many engineers that keep their ears to the ground for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) news. So what sets this product apart?
According to the partnership’s announcement, it’s an “unprecedented level of interoperability among operational technology and informational technology.”
The tool will be taking advantage of the vast amount of big data being collected by production facilities. This data will then be fed into machine learning algorithms to gather trends and predict future outcomes such as breakdowns, bottlenecks and safety concerns.
The idea is that through artificial intelligence, component failures, suboptimal operating conditions and their root causes will be discovered before the engineer even knows there is an issue. This can help the team plan for these instances instead of react to them.
“With IIoT technologies driving vast sensorization of industrial equipment and massive amounts of data being collected on those assets, the collaboration between NI and SparkCognition powers the complex and intelligent processing of information to produce valuable insights,” said Stuart Gillen, director of business development at SparkCognition.
The Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance Testbed is built on NI’s open-software platform, which will also supply the machine learning aspect of the tool. SparkCognition’s cognitive analytics will also be included to help the engineers gain insights into the data.
“We are excited that our platform can acquire the data and extract the features to drive SparkCognition analytics for IIoT solutions,” said Jamie Smith, director of embedded systems at NI. “Combined with existing technologies in the testbed, the addition of SparkCognition presents new ways to help automate the process of turning sensor data into business insight.”
Though it’s not specifically stated in the announcement, one can infer that the interoperability will come from both IBM and NI due to their ubiquitous nature within the manufacturing industry.
To learn more about platforms that offer machine learning and predictive maintenance, check out “eBook: Comparing Platforms to Add Internet of Things Capabilities to Products.”