nuclear_plant_journal

Nuclear
Plant
Journal
Instrumentation &
Control
January-February, 2016
Volume 34 No. 1
This issue featured a barn door ad by GE Hitachi,
click here to see ad.
See Inside Cover
Limerick, USA
ISSN: 0892-2055

Industrial
Internet
Applications
By Eric Mino, GE Hitachi Nuclear
Energy.
Eric Mino
Eric Mino joined GE in 2005 and has
held a variety of
positions at GE
Hitachi Nuclear
Energy including
Nuclear Controls
and Systems
Upgrades Manager,
Innovation
Leader and Vice
President of Asset
Management
Services. He
currently serves
as Vice President
of Digital Nuclear
Services. Eric
holds a Bachelor
of Science in
Facilities and Plant
Engineering from
the Massachusetts
Maritime
Academy and a
Master of Business Administration
from the University of North Carolina
Wilmington.
Responses to questions by Newal
Agnihotri, Editor of Nuclear Plant
Journal.
Exelon Generation has utilized data
and analytics to optimize performance
at Limerick Generating Station. Now the
utility is working with GE Hitachi Nuclear
Energy to develop digital solutions based
on GE’s Predix platform.
1. Last year, it was announced that
Exelon would pilot GE’s Predix platform.
How did this decision come about?
GE Hitachi (GEH) and our GE
Digital Teams have been working with
Exelon since the summer of 2014 to
explore how Exelon could benefit from
the Predix platform. Exelon saw our
approach with Predix as a Platform as
a Service (PaaS)
solution unique in the
Industrial Internet
arena. Exelon and
GEH also had very
complementary
thought processes
and goals around
innovation,
digitization and the
use of advanced
analytics. Predix
is designed to be
system agnostic,
which means it is
able to interact with
existing systems
and infrastructure.
The fact that Exelon
would be able to
leverage its existing
analytics with Predix
and then merge and
develop new analytics on the Predix
platform was an additional major benefit.
2. Describe the Predix Platform and
the applications that are being built on
Predix for the energy industry?
Predix is the platform that powers
GE’s Industrial Internet applications.
The Predix platform is a secure, cloudbased
platform built for and by industry
experts to support the unique scale
and requirements of industrial data.
The platform was designed to allow
developers to quickly build, test and
deploy applications for highly regulated
industries and incorporates decades of
experience in operational and information
security. To help corporations like Exelon
deliver on commitments by operating
proactively and predictively, this software
technology can align operational and
performance insights agnostically across
the full spectrum of generating options.
The Industrial Internet is all about
connecting big data, machines and
the people who operate them. With
this in mind, GE recently unveiled our
vision for the Digital Power Plant at
our global 2015 Minds + Machines
conferences held in San Francisco and
Dubai. The Digital Power Plant enables
greater efficiency and output, more
flexibility for a range of generation
types including intermittent sources, and
helps grid stability. The Predix platform
and solutions are at the heart of the
Digital Power Plant, where three core
Predix suites are pulled together: Asset
Performance Management, Operations
Optimization and Business Optimization.
Digital Power Plant’s Asset Performance
Management (APM) suite of
applications helps our customers reduce
plant downtime and production costs
through predictive and physics-based
analytics. By taking a holistic, predictive
maintenance approach coupled with
decades of monitoring and diagnostics
(M&D) experience, we are helping operators
manage their power plants at high
levels of performance and reliability. Every
day at GE’s remote M&D Center in
Atlanta, we collect more than 30,000 operating
hours of data from a fleet of more
than 1,500 assets. Insights drawn from
this volume of power generation big data
have translated to total customer savings
estimated at $70 million in 2014, up from
more than $53 million in 2013.
For example, one of the pilot projects
at a plant within Exelon’s nuclear
fleet is called Watchtower and focuses
on equipment reliability by utilizing
APM. The ability to foresee and forestall
issues is at the very core of APM for the
power industry. Reliability management
combines predictive advisories,
expert diagnostics and situational
troubleshooting to turn reactive
maintenance processes into predictive
ones. Analysts and operators can
benchmark and compare the performance
of assets, anticipate conflicts to improve
reliability and extend overall asset output.
Digital Power Plant’s Operations
Optimization suite of applications drives
better plant and fleet performance
across equipment manufacturers, site
20 NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, January-February 2016

configurations and power cycles. This
technology delivers enterprise data
visibility across power plant and fleetwide
footprints, providing a holistic
understanding of the operational decisions
that can expand capabilities, such as
related to outage management, lower
production costs and improved reliability.
Operations personnel can compare fleet
performance historically, or to operating
specifications of a digital twin of the
plant, or to our benchmark data. Plant
managers can measure performance,
operational flexibility, system availability
and dispatch optimization.
Digital Power Plant’s Business Optimization
suite of applications will help
deliver exceptional forecasting. Today,
the most competitive power producers
understand that the value of forecasting
performances and related operational
factors is based on the right combination
of engineering expertise, physics-based
analytics and current plant operating
data. This blend of capabilities can deliver
dynamically not only the visibility,
but also the insights needed to identify
any underlying degradation impact and
resulting true plant capability. Business
Optimization solutions will be available
to our customers in 2016.
3. How does Predix address cyber
security concerns for the nuclear
industry?
The current Predix nuclear
applications focus on providing better
information to decision makers in
the plants at either a management or
maintenance level. At this time Predix
in not being deployed at the machine
or safety related system level, often
described as zone 4 in the nuclear
industry, and we are adhering to all
cyber regulations that apply. There
are many potential configurations for
user access, however in most cases
users will access the applications we
are developing via Predix Cloud which
is designed with the most advanced
security protocols available, including
customized, adaptive security solutions
for industrial operators and developers.
We leverage advanced connectivityas-a-service
for industrial assets which
combines proprietary technologies with
global telecommunications partners to
enable rapid provisioning of sensor data,
gateways and software-defined machines.
Predix Cloud will operate seamlessly
with applications and services running in
a broad spectrum of cloud environments.
As such, businesses will be able to take
advantage of its optimized security
and data structure offerings while also
maintaining existing solutions at their
facilities. Unlike public cloud services,
which are open to any individual or
organization, Predix Cloud is based on a
“gated community” model to ensure that
users of the cloud belong to the industrial
ecosystem.
4. In addition to applications built on
Predix, how are customers considering
Predix in other aspects of their business?
As Predix is open source, partners,
customers and others can also become
developers on Predix to create their own
analytics and applications. On the Predix
Cloud, developers will have visibility into
their operating environments. In doing
so, businesses will be able to deploy
and monitor machine apps anywhere,
continuously adjusting to new demands
in the physical and digital world while
providing the security and visibility
required for operational effectiveness.
Again, it is about providing more
insightful information to make better
decisions, faster than organizations have
in the past.
5. What is driving interest in Predix
among nuclear industry customers?
Predix was created to help
industrial organizations take the next
big step in operation performance, asset
performance, and a total improvement of
their individual power generating assets
as well as their entire fleets. Some of
the greatest advantages seen by Predix
users so far include industries with a high
volume of deep human know how.
The nuclear industry has been
sharing know how and best practices
openly for many years which has led to
extreme levels of performance. However,
this has often required extreme levels
of effort. There are limited levels of
improvement that the human brain can
continue to make across the nuclear
fleet. Predix is the tool that can unlock
the next major step change as an enabler
for deep domain experts to do things they
previously only dreamed were possible.
Within our industry, there is both
the need and opportunity to change how
we approach our outages, monitoring,
operations, knowledge management, and
maintenance of the systems in our plants,
and more through data analytics. We want
to work with our customers and partners
to create those next major step changes
in our industry. The openness and
continuous improvement culture of the
nuclear industry is a great match for what
we created within Predix and the Platform
as a Service (Paas) methodology. Predix
simplifies our ability to leverage and
merge information from existing data,
systems, analytics and human knowhow
to create these new digital industrial
solutions.
Contact: Jon Allen, GE Hitachi
Nuclear Energy, 3901 Castle Hayne
Road, Wilmington, North Carolina,
28401; telephone: (910) 819-2581,
email: Jonathan.Allen1@ge.com.
Nuclear Plant Journal, January-February 2016
NuclearPlantJournal.com
21

The future of
power generation.
Bringing the Industrial Internet and data analytics to the nuclear industry.
Building on GE’s Predix platform, GE Hitachi is working to develop solutions to
deliver powerful outcomes for nuclear power plants. New applications that are
part of GE’s Digital Power Plant will incorporate data and analytics to enhance
asset performance management, reduce costs and optimize facilities.
See how we’re working with utilities like Exelon to lead the digital revolution
of the nuclear industry at nuclear.gepower.com/industrial-internet.
Follow us on Twitter @gehnuclear