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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
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