Transportation and Maritime
Proactive fault detection and condition monitoring at the extreme edge
Safe, efficient, and cost-effective edge solutions for Smart Transportation
Operators in the transportation industry are increasingly deploying more intelligent and autonomous edge computing systems to help meet their fleet optimization needs and support other business revenue targets.
Collecting and processing the data at the edge of the transportation network, e.g., making local and real-time decisions on-board the vehicle, train, or ship, can be far more optimal than pushing all data back to a central processing point and also helps enable many use cases for revenue growth and cost saving.
Transportation and Maritime Software
Operational Benefits
Edge computing can support the following set of key business cases in the transportation and maritime industry:
- Fleet monitoring and management
- Optimal route planning and task distribution
- Reduction of unplanned stoppages
- Predictive maintenance of high-value assets
- Provision of new live data-based services enabling new efficiencies and revenue opportunities
Customer Quote...
IOTech’s solutions and deep OT expertise strengthen Accenture’s own edge software and further help Accenture to deliver new customer outcomes by combining edge processing with a wide range of device data sources.
Peter Utzschneider, Managing Director Accenture Platforms Product Management
Technical Challenges
There are a number of technical challenges that software for transportation systems must overcome:
- Need to acquire and aggregate data from a wide number of industrial sensors and devices running on the many different vehicles in the transportation network
- Be able to efficiently process that data on each computing node
- Be able to operate autonomously when needed, for example when a vehicle has lost network coverage or when a ship is out to sea
- Support the control and monitoring of each vehicle from a centralized point when needed
- Operate securely at all levels of the infrastructure
Key Benefits of the IOTech Solution:
IOTech edge software for transportation provides the following key capabilities:
- Edge data acquisition from a wide range of industrial protocols including Modbus, OPC UA, CANopen, and many others prevalent in the transportation industry
- Collection of data relating to live positioning, e.g., GPS and marine standards such as NMEA
- Support for data fusion, rules, decision making and data visualization at the edge
- Ability to run on any edge hardware device (gateway, industrial PC, server) allowing an open choice of hardware vendor and form factor across the fleet
- Integration to major cloud platforms such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, etc, with filtering and other smart controls to manage edge-cloud data flow
- Scalable and centralized management of the solution covering both hardware and software
Professional Services
Customer Example: Proactive fault detection and condition monitoring of ship engines deployed out at sea around the world
Challenge: Need to collect and analyze a vast amount of edge data produced by marine propulsion diesel engines to provide value-added services to their customers, such as proactive fault detection and condition monitoring of these extremely high-value assets.
Solution: Along with a specialized System Integrator we delivered the shipboard edge data acquisition and processing solution based on Edge Xpert and a common Cloud backend for remote monitoring and management via Edge Builder.
Benefits: Bringing a new diesel engine monitoring product/service to the market which will allow the customer to create new revenue opportunities.
