James Macaulay ABB Corporate Communications Vancouver, Canada, james.macaulay@ca.abb.com
Spanning all four of ABB’s business areas, and serving sectors like manufacturing, energy, transportation, marine, cities and construction, ABB Ability solutions are grounded in software but also rely on hardware and services to connect, secure, monitor, contextualize, visualize and analyze field data. Solutions are designed to enable a host of industrial use cases, including condition monitoring, asset health and management, predictive maintenance, energy management, simulation and virtual commissioning, remote/collaborative support and more, all falling under the umbrella of the “Industrial Internet of Things” (IIoT). Examples include ABB Ability™ Genix industrial analytics and AI suite; ABB Ability™ Energy and Asset Manager; ABB Ability™ Condition Monitoring for Powertrains; and ABB Ability™ Connected Services.
In general, ABB Ability solutions use sensors placed on (or embedded in) physical assets like motors, drives, pumps, fans, compressors, robots, buildings and electrical infrastructure. Data from these devices is transmitted across all manner of protocols and networking standards to edge devices or to the cloud for processing. From here, organizations can aggregate data and feed various operational and enterprise systems to perform analytics that help users make better decisions about how to manage an asset, fleet or value chain.
Many solutions in the ABB Ability portfolio leverage platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities from partners like Microsoft and Huawei for compute, storage, database, identity management and other functionality to create a secure and highly scalable industrial cloud architecture. On top of this foundation, ABB incorporates relevant hardware (eg, switchgear, edge gateways), enterprise-grade cybersecurity for key workflows, and specialized, domain-specific software algorithms.
