Narasimham Parimi ABB Process Automation Bangalore, India, Narasimham.Parimi@in.abb.com; Christian Johansson ABB Process Automation Malmö, Sweden, christian.johansson@se.abb.com
The world of industrial production is experiencing significant fluctuation as popular just-in-time practices prove unable to address supply chain challenges in pandemic-impacted economies. Furthermore, increasing efforts to lower carbon emissions are affecting every aspect of industrial production.
Fundamental to improving production predictability, meeting sustainability targets and achieving other strategic outcomes are the production assets themselves. How these assets perform dictate if customer demand is met, if needed goods such as power, food, water and medicine get to the people who need them, if a production facility continues to be a “going concern” and if the enterprise itself survives.
All these factors make strong asset management critical. In today’s fast-moving, digitalized, 24/7 production environment, keeping assets performing, avoiding unplanned downtime due to asset failure and extending asset life as much as possible makes APM an important and essential practice for industrial producers, power generators, water purifiers and cargo transporters.
To get the best out of their assets, owners and operators must not only perform condition monitoring, but also attain a complete view of the asset from performance, maintenance, reliability and integrity aspects. The parties concerned also need to develop optimal strategies that minimize asset failures and maximize asset life.
ABB has introduced the ABB Ability Genix APM Suite with a view to help customers achieve these goals →01.
ABB Ability Genix APM Suite
Maintenance and reliability practitioners have long focused on condition monitoring of assets to make operational and maintenance decisions. Rapidly changing market dynamics demand a more comprehensive, integrated view of asset performance, integrity and reliability in order to attain maximum productivity. The journey from individual point solutions to a comprehensive suite of APM solutions is empowered by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), cloud connectivity, “Big Data” analytics and AI algorithms that help to identify data trends and automatically take actions to maximize asset efficiency and value.
The ABB Ability Genix APM Suite consolidates a portfolio of previous condition monitoring offerings from ABB into a new, pan-industry, future-proof platform that is agnostic with regards to the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). Genix APM enables users to evolve from reactive and preventive maintenance to predictive and prescriptive maintenance. Genix APM also allows users to choose in advance how they want to manage asset life cycles (eg, extend maintenance frequencies, or calculate replacement schedules). The suite further helps users to discover hidden interdependencies that can be harnessed to optimize productivity →02.
Genix APM accomplishes this by collecting, contextualizing and analyzing data from multiple sources, and providing the software tools to perform the most useful asset interactions.
The suite is composed of several modules →03:
ABB Ability Genix APM Predict
APM Predict is a fully integrated condition monitoring system that gathers data from plant assets and process equipment, and analyzes that data through prebuilt asset models that identify early indicators of asset degradation and track degradation progress. The early recognition and tracking of asset health predictive indicators by APM Predict helps operators make the transition from wasteful preventative maintenance activities to an optimized predictive maintenance strategy. APM Predict provides near real-time, status-based condition monitoring on the “edge” of the cloud. APM Predict:
• Is easy to add into an existing operational technology (OT) landscape, where it runs as a native application on the edge, thus providing connectivity to, for example, ABB Extended Automation System 800xA Publisher, ABB Symphony Plus publisher, OPC UA servers, or Modbus TCP devices.
• Comes with prebuilt asset models covering a wide range of assets that address ABB offerings and target industries. These models include assets that range from simple sensors and field instruments up to complex electrical, rotating and process equipment.
• Features an easy-to-use maintenance workplace interface in which the user can see condition notifications and recommendations, as well as organize and understand assets across plant areas, sites, or fleets of assets.
• Displays electrical assets in the electrical context via a single-line diagram viewer.
Asset condition information is provided according to NAMUR NE107 (a field device data standard), or according to an asset health severity scoring. It is possible to group and organize asset models, assign a criticality to different task models and provide a calculated view of the overall health of an asset →04.
ABB Ability Genix APM Predict
Predict 360 extends the power of predictive asset models from prebuilt versions to customizable versions specific to an industrial operation. Predict 360 provides an environment for asset subject matter experts and data scientists to continuously capture and codify their knowledge into ABB Ability Genix APM, which helps automate diagnostic activities, reveal latent asset and process issues, and discover opportunities for higher production efficiency and asset utilization. Predict 360 helps in advanced fault prediction, increasing uptime and preventing failures of critical assets. The module comes with a configurable asset model library that has prebuilt dominant failure modes. Predict 360 is a self-service application that allows any authorized person to set and configure rules – or AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms – to enable predictive maintenance →05. It also has a comprehensive workplace for asset fault monitoring with recommendations.
Predict 360 provides users, such as data scientists, with advanced modeling capabilities that can be leveraged to expand the basic models of APM Predict into first-principle and ML models. In addition to these advanced modeling capabilities, Predict 360 provides an environment for clients to embed enterprise knowledge and capture tribal knowledge.
One modeling concept that is gaining prominence is the digital twin. A digital twin provides an essential replica of a physical asset, system or process in digital form, enabling intervention before problems occur [1]. Digital twins embody deep domain experience and apply physics-based or AI/ML models to the behavior they capture.
It is within Predict 360 that digital twins are created to help predict failure and eliminate the changes that happen in the “black boxes” into which operatives normally cannot see.
ABB Ability Genix APM Perform 360
Perform 360 epitomizes the ability to gain greater asset insight by performing analytics on a combined OT and IT dataset. Perform 360 integrates the contextualized data of plant IT systems, such as an existing computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), with OT data streaming from APM Predict modules. This provides plant reliability experts with a deeper event perspective as well as a means to monetize different maintenance options, consider impacts of planned maintenance schedules and devise a means to extend intervention intervals and asset longevity. Perform 360 provides insights across asset performance, health, maintenance and life-cycle costs. To simplify deployment, Perform 360 comes with more than 40 out-of-the-box asset templates with prebuilt performance models and an array of embedded calculations →06.
It is also possible to assign different types of alarm and integrity operating window limits and track these from dashboards in the Performance Monitoring Workplace. Compliance can also be tracked.
The value of Perform 360 lies in its use of preconfiguration to make effective deployment simple. The module leverages preconfigured key performance indicators (KPIs) with self-service analytics, including computerized maintenance management system data, and aids decision making through insights into maintenance compliance, failure and damage statistics, life cycle costs and replacement schedules. Perform 360 can also find assets that are mapped using the asset templates and immediately view the prebuilt parameters and KPIs in various dashboards. The module leverages the Knowledge Services Hub of the Genix Suite to calculate these KPIs and deliver insights to the user’s browser.
ABB Ability Genix APM Assess 360
Assess 360 provides the tools that traditional APM systems miss: the ability to mine the integrated IT/OT dataset and perform financial data analysis toward optimized asset OPEX and CAPEX planning. Assess 360 helps ensure that short- and long-term asset investments deliver the greatest financial outcomes to business income statements and balance sheets. Assess 360 provides a 360-degree view of assets in terms of performance in order to optimize capital and operational expenditures. This overview helps the operations manager, maintenance specialist or asset owner to understand remaining asset life and maintenance needs →07.
Asset life assessment is a very important focus for organizations with old or aging assets. Such an assessment enables the characterization and understanding of possible failure scenarios. With Assess 360, potential failure mechanisms can be defined, providing the necessary information for mitigation. Further, integrity parameters can be tracked and the qualitative risk of certain failure scenarios according to different risk categories can be analyzed to forecast an optimum blend of maintenance or replacement. This capability makes sophisticated maintenance approaches such as Reliability-Centered Maintenance possible.
Genix Datalyzer
The ABB AbilityTM Genix Industrial Analytics and AI Suite is a platform upon which many digitalization applications may be built to meet various customer needs. For example, an emerging Genix Sustainability Suite addresses the increasing environmental compliance pressures imposed by governments and includes an industrial data analytics offering for ABB’s emissions monitoring systems. This offering is known as the ABB AbilityTM Genix Datalyzer. Emissions monitoring is a significant pressure point for businesses and is becoming even more so with the world’s focus on sustainable production. The Datalyzer’s emission reports are needed by ABB customers to prove environmental compliance, as compliance requires a record of regular equipment inspections and calibration, which Datalyzer tracks cost-effectively in a remote-enabled way.
Genix – a software suite for APM and more
The Genix APM Suite delivers significant improvements in operations by estimating the remaining useful life of assets and providing a maintenance plan that can reduce asset downtime by up to 50 percent and increase asset life by up to 40 percent [2]. Customers in asset-intensive industries – energy, manufacturing, marine, process or utility – can benefit significantly from the ABB Ability Genix APM Suite. Genix APM is modular and can be scaled up as the number of assets or production units rise. The Genix APM Suite resolves many of the asset-specific, function-limited aspects of previous-generation asset management technology to maximize uptime and ensure that producers perform optimally in today’s rapidly changing world.
References
[1] S. Kulkarni, “The twin that’s key to decoding asset DNA.” Available: https://new.abb.com/cpm/industrial-software-solutions/asset-performance-management/the-twin-thats-key-to-decoding-asset-system-dna [Accessed: February 18, 2022].
[2] V. Dilda et al., “Manufacturing: Analytics unleashes productivity and profitability.” Available: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/manufacturing-analytics-unleashes-productivity-and-profitability [Accessed December 17, 2021].
