The focus of this quarter’s ABB Review, the company’s technical journal, is “machines with intelligence.” Innovations like 5G, edge computing and cloud architectures, along with artificial intelligence and machine learning, are laying the foundation for the digital transformation of industry by infusing machines with new levels of intelligence.
Getting business value from machines with intelligence—and the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) more broadly—is a two-part proposition, however. First, it involves acquiring new data about machines. Adding intelligence to a device means connecting it to other devices, systems and applications in a way that sheds new light on the matter at hand, such as the optimal running of a machine. Second, an organization needs to empower its people to apply this acquired data in order to generate new insights and take better, smarter decisions.
Industry is awash in data. As such, in most instances, the issue is not the availability or quantity of data, but rather its quality. Data must be accurate, up to date, relevant and contextualized to be useful and to create business value. Thus, industrial organizations must focus equally on the acquisition of data and on ensuring workers can derive maximum utility from this new information. As Marjukka Mäkelä, a user experience (UX) design leader for ABB, puts it in ABB Review, “The greatest breakthroughs are of little value if humans cannot use them to their potential.”
The ABB Ability™ portfolio of more than 200 digital solutions combines these two elements in a simple and powerful way for companies in sectors like manufacturing, transportation, utilities and construction. The latest edition of ABB Review is packed with examples of pioneering ABB Ability™ solutions that are transforming industrial processes and creating new business outcomes across a host of use cases, ranging from asset health to condition monitoring and energy efficiency.
Many of the most exciting use cases begin with ABB Ability™ Smart Sensors. ABB Ability™ Smart Sensors turn physical, mechanical and analog equipment into sources of digital intelligence, converting traditional motors, pumps, mounted bearings and gearing into smart devices that provide new types of data about operations. They measure key parameters from equipment which can be used to gain information on its condition and performance, enabling users to identify inefficiencies and to reduce risks related to operation and maintenance.
Companies have multiple options to empower users to leverage smart sensors, including the ABB Ability™ Smart Sensor app for smartphones, or through an ABB edge gateway that transmits information to a secure cloud for access by other approved enterprise applications. Data in the cloud can be stored in the ABB Ability™ digital portal, from which it can be visualized and analyzed using the latest algorithms and machine learning tools. The ABB Ability™ Digital Powertrain, which draws on smart sensors, provides a suite of hardware, software and services to acquire data and apply it, yielding new insights that span entire processes.
In an electrification context, ABB’s Tmax XT breaker illustrates what Eumir Rizzi of ABB Electrification describes as a shift in the circuit breaker paradigm “from a protection device to a data source.” With technology like the Tmax XT, information – about not just current but also voltage and operational parameters like temperature, pressure and vibration – can be digitalized at the device level and stored, analyzed, visualized or downloaded. These digital breakers come outfitted with a color touchscreen and connect to smartphone and tablet-based apps that allow the user to navigate menus of information about why a circuit has tripped—a huge improvement in terms of ease of use and the value-added information available to the end user.
The real power of digital breaker innovations, however, lies in the application of this new data to drive new business insights. That’s where the ABB Ability™ Energy and Asset Manager solution comes in. ABB Ability™ Energy and Asset Manager is a state-of-the-art cloud solution for monitoring and analyzing site equipment and allows managers to control a site's electrical distribution system and other utilities, resulting in energy savings of as much as 20 percent and 30 percent lower operating expenses. The solution enables multi-utility monitoring, energy audits, and cost management in a single, intuitive dashboard to help organizations understand their energy consumption and identify areas of improvement—in one location or across multiple sites.
Across a range of facilities, including offices, retail shops and hotels, data centers, and industrial plants, ABB Ability™ Energy and Asset Manager provides not just device-level visibility, but empowers insights at the system level. The solution’s cloud architecture has been developed in partnership with Microsoft in order to guarantee world-class reliability and security from end to end.
And in yet another industrial setting, consider the example of ABB Ability™ Hoverguard for mobile gas leak detection. This solution allows oil and gas operators to detect methane, ethane and other harmful leaks with 1,000 times the effectiveness of traditional means by flying drones outfitted with sensors along pipelines to conduct virtual inspections and analysis. This approach helps companies simultaneously save costs and fight greenhouse gas emissions. Sending the data to the cloud means information can be disseminated anywhere in the world so authorized users can review data about gas leaks and take action. It’s another novel way that ABB is helping customers acquire new and more complete data about their operations while empowering them with user-friendly tools and analytics to power better decision-making.
To empower people effectively, industrial organizations need a deep understanding of a business process to provide the right context in which to take a decision—that’s when information becomes meaningful, when it becomes knowledge. ABB’s domain expertise comes from 130 years of innovating to improve industrial business processes. We combine this wealth of industry knowhow with expertise in human-centered design to put the end user front and center, enabling companies to empower their people and ultimately realize greater value from technology investments.
