With Ars sending writers around the globe to visit GE research centers, we wanted our readers to share in with some of the experiences we’re having during these travels. These blog posts are meant to convey some highlights, rather than being an exhaustive account of our trip.
After Lee Hutchison got back from witnessing how GE is building smarter composites at the company’s Global Research Center in Munich, he handed off the virtual travel baton to me. My mission? I wanted to dive deeper into how GE is tapping into Internet of Things (IoT) technology, or what GE calls the Industrial Internet.
That quest took me to San Ramon, California, the home of GE Software, where I learned about the big data and analytics platform GE is building in hopes of squeezing ever-higher levels of efficiency out of all of its industrial operations. The company is working on a platform called Predix, which taps into the data generated by control and diagnostic systems in addition to the domain knowledge of the people who built them. The goal with Predix is to create a platform that can build analytic software and other services in order to help GE and its customers squeeze more efficiency out of industrial operations. Predix leverages what the company calls an industrial “data lake”—a massive cloud store of telemetry and other data from industrial systems that it then uses to build models and analytical applications.
Harel Kodesh, GE Software’s chief technology officer, explained that he also hopes Predix will eventually act as a sort of “app store,” allowing selected third-party developers to build applications for industrial customers based on the streams of data being pushed to the cloud. For example, Christina Brasco, a GE Software data scientist, was using data sets gathered from GE’s fleet of aircraft engines to build mathematical models that change how GE does jet engine maintenance. Brasco’s creation aims to predict when engines will need maintenance and schedule it to happen in advance to prevent unexpected, unscheduled downtime that could cost airlines millions in lost revenue. (We’ll look a bit deeper into this kind of Internet of Things analytics later this week.)
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