14 New GE Industrial Internet Technologies Move Machines Closer to Zero Unplanned Downtime

There is more than one way to fly a plane. When the weather is good and the skies are open at the destination airport, pilots can cut costs by loading less fuel and shedding the extra weight. But they need good information to make the call.

GE just made the decision easier. The company's Flight Efficiency Services system (FES) is one of 14 big data technologies released today to help airlines, energy companies, hospitals and other customers cut downtime, improve productivity, and reduce emissions.

GE software engineers are using a "first-of-its-kind" industrial-strength software development platform called Predix to build the applications. The platform provides a standard and secure way to create apps for any machine or device connected to the Industrial Internet, a digital network that links machines, sensors generating data, people and the cloud. “Industrial data is not only big, it’s the most critical and complex type of big data,” says Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO. “Our greatest challenge and opportunity is to manage and analyze this data in a highly secure way to deliver better outcomes for customers and society.”

GE has also partnered with AT&T, Cisco and Intel to improve data flow and boost wired and wireless connectivity.

Immelt is speaking today at GE’s Minds and Machines conference in Chicago.

"Standing next to a blowout preventer, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt opened the Minds and Machines conference in Chicago today. New GE Industrial Internet technology called Drilling iBox gathers and analyzes industrial data from the subsea machine, and allows drilling rig crews to minimize unplanned downtime."

Immelt says that GE is developing predictive software and hardware systems and industrial sensors that constantly measure machine performance, identify productivity gains and reduce unplanned downtime. “Observing, predicting and changing performance is how the Industrial Internet will help airlines, railroads and power plants operate at peak efficiency,” he says.

Brazil’s Gol Airlines, for example, is using GE's FES software to analyze and track its flight routes and optimize fuel consumption. The airline predicts that the system will save $90 million over the next five years. St. Luke’s Medical Center is using GE software to manage and analyze patient and equipment data. The system has already helped the hospital shave 51 minutes from bed turnaround time and reduce patient wait times.

GE launched the first 10 Industrial Internet products last year. The products have brought in $290 million in revenues and another $400 million in orders to date. The company said that it plans to leverage its high-margin $160 billion services backlog to develop more predictive technologies, grow software sales, and help customers become even more efficient.

No More Unplanned Downtime: GE Report Finds Industrial Internet Could Lead to “Profound Transformation” in Way Humans Work, Boost Productivity by $20 Billion

A gas turbine service manual can clock in at 1,000 pages, about the length of a small-type version of War & Peace. Crews often haul the tomes from one remote location to another to do maintenance work. They travel on a set timetable and lack real-time information about the condition of the turbines. “If they come too late and failure occurs, unplanned downtime can cascade across the system and affect the economy,” says GE Chief Economist Marco Annunziata.

But there is a better way. Soon workers will be able to store and access maintenance information on simple handheld devices, brainstorm repairs with colleagues, and even monitor and talk to the turbines themselves. Annunziata and Peter C. Evans, director of global strategy and analytics at GE, just released a new report titled Industrial Internet@Work, which is making a case for a new way of unleashing the power of information in the workplace. They found that time and money “wasted largely due to deficiencies in how information is gathered, stored, accessed and shared” on servicing machines serving just a handful of industries could amount to more than 300 million man-hours, or $20 billion per year.

Annunziata and Evans write that the Industrial Internet, which brings together the digital and machine worlds, could help people work more efficiently and productively with machines, allow them to collaborate and share information faster, and profoundly transform the workplace. They say that “a key feature of the Industrial Internet is that information itself becomes intelligent. When workers need it, information will find them—they will not need to hunt for it.”


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The authors argue that the Industrial Internet - enabled by increased connectivity, collaboration, data analytics, and cloud-based software and mobile apps - will change the work experience for hundreds of thousands of workers, from field engineers and drilling rig workers to pilots, doctors and nurses. “The Industrial Internet will empower them with faster access to relevant information, relying on analytics generating new insights, [and] mobile collaboration tools revolutionizing the way that information is shared and disseminated,” they write. “Machines will play an active part in this; connected and communicative machines will be able to self-monitor, self-heal, and proactively send information to other machines and to their human partners.”

Sometime in the near future, a wind farm engineer will travel with a wireless device that can indicate which turbine needs attention and which needs to be fixed. The same device will store and transmit technical information and enable the engineer to share video with colleagues at other locations to instantly tap their expertise.

Will machines make people redundant? Annunziata and Evans disagree. They write that companies must play a pivotal role in educating workers and teaching them new skills. Annunziata argues that “a new, highly-skilled workforce will emerge as the Industrial Internet is poised to have a significant impact.” He and Evans say that the innovations discussed in their paper will “augment and enhance the abilities of workers, enabling them to work with greater efficiency, better results, and greater productivity,” and turn “industrial operators into skilled information-workers,”

Writes Annunziata: “Workers will be racing with the new, intelligent machines of the Industrial Internet, not against them—more Iron Man than the Charlie Chaplin of Modern Times.”

Analyze This: The Industrial Internet by the Numbers & Outcomes

Speaking at last year’s Minds and Machines conference in San Francisco, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said that a global network connecting people, data and machines called the Industrial Internet had the potential to add $10 to $15 trillion to global GDP over the next 20 years. He announced that GE would invest $1 billion in developing Industrial Internet technology and applications to make customers more productive. “I read sometimes that people think that the big era of productivity is over,” Immelt said. “But we see multiple ways for new productivity that are here today.” Immelt said that industrial companies are “no longer just about the big iron. All of us will seek to interface with the analytics, the data and the software that’s around our products.”

GE businesses from aviation to healthcare have released a number of new products that harness the power of the Industrial Internet. Take a look at the outcomes they have achieved on the on the eve of GE’s second U.S. Minds and Machines conference, which takes place this Wednesday in Chicago.

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GE Aviation and Accenture launched Taleris in 2012. The joint-venture provides airlines and cargo carriers with tools to predict, prevent and recover from operational disruptions like those caused by severe weather. The FAA estimates that delays cost airlines more than $8.3 billion in 2010. But Taleris President and CEO Norm Baker says that “significant benefits can be realized through our predictive analytics technologies which leverage an aircraft’s data within the context of the operations so one can address an issue before it occurs.” Andy Heather, vice president of engineering at Taleris, agrees. “The aircraft is clearly the airline’s biggest and most important asset,” he said. “Traditionally, however, the aircraft has not been well connected into the airlines’ digital systems, operations and maintenance to the same degree, leaving significant potential value unrealized.” Airlines like Etihad Airways have already signed up.
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When TransCanada Corp. decided to overhaul New York City’s largest power plant, it deployed GE’s Industrial Internet software and hardware. Rather than spending hundreds of millions on new equipment, TransCanada connected data sensors to software and started gathering and analyzing data critical to the performance of the plant’s largest gas turbine. The system, called FlexEfficiency Advantage Advanced Gas Path, is using the data to fine-tune the turbine to make sure that it is always running at its optimal level. “It’s real time and it’s interactive,” says John McWilliams, vice president of energy operations at TransCanada. “As things are changing, the control system is responding and always optimizing the unit.” As a result of the upgrade Ravenswood is now using less fuel to produce the same amount of power, making electricity cheaper and, relatively speaking, cleaner. TransCanada says that the upgrade has increased output by 5 percent. That’s enough electricity to power 10,000 NYC households.
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  In May engineers at GE’s renewable energy business unveiled the “world’s first brilliant wind turbine.” The turbine is loaded with sensors and powerful software that can communicate with other turbines and even other wind farms. It has the option to come with a battery that allows producers and the wind turbines themselves to make decisions based on data coming in and supply predictable power in the short-term. “We are using advanced forecasting algorithms and a small amount of battery storage to meet a forecast of how much power we will be able to deliver for the next 15 minutes to one hour,” says Keith Longtin, general manager for wind products at the GE business. The sensors and software alone can make the GE2.5-120 wind turbine 25 percent more efficient and 15 percent more productive than comparable GE models.
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  A single GE Evolution Series locomotive can pull a load equivalent to 170 Boeing 747 jetliners. That’s impressive, but for innovative railroads like Norfolk Southern, brawn is no longer good enough. They employ locomotive engineers as well as software engineers and gather gigabytes of data about their trains and rails. “We know where every tree is growing beside the track,” Deborah Butler, Norfolk Southern’s chief information officer told data journalist Jon Bruner from O’Reilly Media.

Norfolk Southern feeds that data to software systems like GE’s Trip Optimizer. Bruner calls Trip Optimizer “a kind of autopilot for locomotives” that “observes the entire context of a journey – that consists of a train, grades along its route, the urgency of its delivery – and controls [the locomotive's] throttle in real time.” Butler told Brunner that Trip Optimizer, together with another piece of GE railroad software called Movement Planner cut her company’s fuel usage by 6.3 percent and increased speed by 10 to 20 percent.
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What do Twitter updates, NASA’s tree-spotting satellite, and special effects from a Tom Cruise thriller have in common with the utility poles outside your house? They help power companies to keep the lights on. In January GE rolled out a new grid management system called Grid IQ Insight that harvests diverse data from social media, smart meters, satellites, the weather service, the U.S. census and other sources to help utilities predict and prevent electrical outages. The system allows utility workers to manipulate the information with their hands, a la Cruise in the movie Minority Report. Trees that fall on wires is one headache that the system can tackle. “One of the companies we work with spends $70 million a year trimming trees,” says Jonathan Garrity, product manager at GE Digital Energy. “By combining outage, weather and satellite data we can make vegetation management more targeted, improving reliability and keeping these costs low.”
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Nobody likes waiting and doctors at Florida’s Aventura Hospital and Medical Center hate crowded waiting rooms as much as their patients. Last year, Aventura invested in AgileTrac, a GE software system pooling and crunching gigabytes of patient and equipment data zipping across a hospital-size Industrial Internet. Each patient now receives an electronic wristband during admission. The wristband automatically checks in as patients arrive in their beds, travel around the hospital, and check out. Similar tags track IV pumps, heart monitors and other equipment. Aventura estimates that AgileTrac has cut more than 3,000 hours in discharge time at the 400-bed hospital over nine months and freed up the emergency room. “We are doing much better now than a year ago,” says Karen Bibbo, chief nursing officer at Aventura’s parent, HCA East Florida.
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  If the Industrial Internet is the nervous system that animates machines of the new industrial age, then the heavy-duty printed circuit board assemblies, or PCBAs, designed and manufactured at GE’s new plant in Minden, Nevada, are the nerves and neurons that lash it all together. The plant, which opened in June, is part of GE Oil & Gas and serves as a one-stop workshop where GE engineers develop and test PCBAs monitoring machinery used by businesses as diverse as oil and gas, power generation, automotive manufacturing and health care. The Industrial Internet has the potential to add $10 to $15 trillion to global GDP over the next 20 years.
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Hey! You! Get Onto My Cloud: GE Moves Big Machines to the Cloud

Utility bills, electronic airline tickets and medical records already live in massive data centers we’ve come to call “the cloud,” putting them never farther away than our fingertips. But GE said today it would start moving far more complex machine data to the cloud and build the first big data and analytic platform robust enough to manage the torrent of information generated by turbines, jet engines, medical scanners and other technology.

GE has partnered with Amazon Web Services, which pioneered the development of the cloud ‑ and coined its name ‑ to broaden GE's data software and analytical offerings. GE also expanded its partnerships with Accenture and Pivotal to develop new Industrial Internet services and deploy new high-volume machine data management software based on the powerful Hadoop open-source framework.

Werner Vogels, Amazon's chief technology officer said that GE's "domain expertise" combined with Amazon's global infrastructure, services, and big data expertise "will help enable customers to solve problems in ways we haven’t even imagined yet, such as improved accuracy in healthcare treatments or extreme levels of energy efficiency.” Paul Maritz, Pivotal's CEO, said that Pivotal and GE shared "a vision for a common platform that is cloud-agnostic and based on modern, scale-out technologies, and does it all at speeds faster than what was previously possible."

Jeff Kelly, a big data analyst with the Wikibon Project, said that new research by his firm found that an industrial strength cloud environment "needs to meet the challenges of integrating large volumes of machine data with data from other sources while executing near real-time analytics." Kelly said that GE had "both the Industrial Internet technology and the deep expertise across healthcare, energy, transportation and aviation" and was "well positioned ... to develop and deliver software and services capable of scaling and delivering meaningful insight and action from complex industrial data."



The GE "machine cloud" technology will undergird the Industrial Internet, a robust data network designed to bring machines into the digital age, equip them with sensors and software, and use the data they generate to make customers more efficient.

“GE’s industrial-strength platform is the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity, but the next era of computing,” said Bill Ruh, vice president of GE’s Global Software Center. “The ability to bring machines to life with powerful software and sensors is a big advancement - but it is only in the ability to quickly analyze, understand and put machine-based data to work in real-time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data. We are building an ecosystem with partners to save money for our customers and unlock new value for society.”

The new cloud technology will work together with GE’s “Predictivity” services and technologies like Grid IQ, AgileTrac and Taleris, which customers like Mount Sinai Hospital, Etihad Airways and Norfolk Southern have tapped to manage and operate their medical machines, planes and trains.

Two new research papers from the Wikibon Project say that industries have been slower than enterprises to take advantage of the cloud because industrial big data has unique requirements and managing this data requires enormous computing power. Wikibon found that industrial data will grow at two times the rate of any other big data segment within the next ten years, and that companies will spend more that $500 billion by 2020 to handle and analyze this growing avalanche of bits moving with increasing speed. Wikibon estimates that the Industrial Internet could create $1.3 trillion in new value by the end of the decade by improving productivity and efficiency.

GE Invests in Pivotal to Accelerate New Analytic Services and Solutions for the Industrial Internet

GE will invest $105 million in the cloud-based software applications company Pivotal. The strategic investment in the VMware and EMC spin-off will allow GE to speed up development of advanced analytic services for the Industrial Internet.

The apps will allow customers to analyze and understand big data generated by machines and stored in the cloud. “It’s no secret that the cloud and big data are driving dramatic business transformation,” said Bill Ruh who leads GE Global Software Center in San Ramon, California. “They are enabling the Industrial Internet.”

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Over the last two decades, the Internet has transformed media, communications and advertising. The Industrial Internet combines that connectivity with low-cost sensing to turn big iron into brilliant iron. It has the potential to save a motley group of customers ranging from airlines to oil and gas companies and hospitals hundreds of billions of dollars by becoming more efficient.

Pivotal is based in San Francisco, just across the bay from San Ramon where the GE Global Software Center opened 18 months ago. Hundreds of GE software engineers are already writing Industrial Internet software at the center.

Ruh said that Pivotal was creating a platform that brings to businesses the Internet’s best features like rapid application development, data analytics and cloud architecture. “This is aligned with many of the things we are doing at GE to help accelerate our delivery of innovation, and to bring a productivity revolution that will have a positive impact on all of us,” Ruh said.

Click to watch today's live press conference.

Paul Maritz, Pivotal CEO, said that the GE investment in his company underscored “the profound change in business and the historic opportunity that Pivotal has in delivering a platform to help GE’s customers succeed.”

“We are experiencing a major change in the wide-scale move to cloud computing, which includes both infrastructural transformation and transformation of how applications will be built and used based on cloud, mobility and big data,” Maritz said. “This transformation is also happening in enterprises where their environments must adapt to a world that is data-centric, agile and real-time.”

The investment is expected to close within a month, subject to standard regulatory approval and other closing conditions.

Designed for Speed: GE Opens Thousands of Patents to Garage Inventors from the Quirky Community

Ever since Samuel Hopkins received the first U.S. patent for making potash in 1790, inventors and companies have used patents as shield and sword to protect their ideas. Not anymore. Channeling the lean startup vibe, GE has invited innovators to turn swords into gadgets.



For the first time in the company’s history, GE will open thousands of patents to a community of inventors and tinkerers gathered around Quirky, an innovative design company using online collaboration and crowdsourcing to develop new products.

GE and Quirky will also launch “Wink: Instantly Connected,” a product development platform focused on building a co-branded line of app-enabled domestic devices connected to the Internet. These gadgets will improve health, water and air quality, and security, and can be produced by using advanced manufacturing tools and technologies like 3-D printing. Quirky will develop the products for distribution to large U.S. retailers. People can start pitching their ideas today.

The Wink products will marry everyday things with the Internet and bring this union, which GE calls the Industrial Internet, to people’s homes. Ben Kaufman, Quirky founder and CEO, says that “our future will be driven by access to things via our smartphones – there is a ton of invention to be done in this area and no one owns this category.”

Kaufman says that "for years patents have become widely misunderstood and misused. We are going to return patents to their original purpose to act as a blueprint for technological and societal progress while protecting inventors and becoming a source of inspiration for future creators.”

GE will first open up patents that include optical systems, a potentially disruptive technology called dual cooling jets, and surface coating methods called barrier coating.

Besides its patents and technology, GE will also bring to the partnership commercial expertise and scale. Quirky will contribute crowdsourcing know-how and speedy product development. “We admire Quirky’s speed, collaboration and inventiveness and by opening up lab-proven technology and patents to everyday inventors we can help inspire new ideas and accelerate advanced manufacturing innovation,” said Beth Comstock, GE’s chief marketing officer. “At GE we are passionate about innovation at market speed, working with entrepreneurs and finding new models for business. This partnership is just another way we can help inspire invention and help scale it.”

Starting with Thomas Edison, GE’s success and growth has stood on innovation and product development. Two GE employees have received Nobel Prizes and three other Nobel laureates spent time working at GE Global Research labs (GRC). GE engineers have built machines and devices that revolutionized how we live, from the first U.S. jet engine and the first full-body MRI machine, to the invention of the LED.

GRC employs 3,000 scientists in six labs around the world, including 1,125 PhDs. In 2012 alone, GE filed 3,522 patents and spent $4.5 billion on research and development.

Touch Down: GE’s Quest to Know When Your Flight Will Land

Why do some flights arrive early while others touch down hours late? It’s a riddle that consumes frequent flyers and airlines alike. It can result in headaches and missed connections, not to mention the millions in losses each year when a plane is not in the right place at the right time. GE and partners Alaska Airlines and Kaggle decided to find out, and opened the question to hundreds of data wizards from around the world.

This morning, they announced the results of the Flight Quest challenge to use data and software to reduce air travel delays. A similar challenge called Hospital Quest, where GE and Kaggle partnered with the Ochsner Health System, focused on improving healthcare.

Developers and data scientists from 58 countries submitted more than 3,000 ideas competing for a total prize pool of $600,000 in cash awards.



The economic stakes are high. A recent study of congestion at New York City airports found that “current and projected levels of congestion in New York contribute to expensive delays, loss of productivity, wasted fuel, and pollution of the environment to a degree that should not be tolerated.” Boeing estimates the number of airplanes in service will double between 2011 and 2031, from 20,000 to 40,000.

The top prize winners of the Flight Quest challenge come from Team Gxav &* based in Singapore. Xavier Conort, Cao Hong, Clifton Phua, Ghim-Eng Yap and Kenny Chua built a mathematical model that helps improve runway and gate arrival time estimates by as much as 40 percent over industry standards.

In some cases, the winners had scarcely ever set foot on a plane. Second-place finisher Pawel Jankiewicz noted that all of the data about wind speed, air speed and other variables are just numbers that feed into algorithms. “It starts to talk to me,” Jankiewicz said of the data. “I must know what it means.”

Team Gxav &*’s improved algorithms have the potential to save travelers more than five minutes at the gate and could translate to significant savings for airlines. A one-minute reduction per departure could save an average-sized airline 1,700 hours per year, the equivalent of reducing crew costs by $1.2 million and fuel costs by $5 million.


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“Improved accuracy can help us avoid gate congestion, and minimize delays for passengers and crews,” says Gary Beck, vice president for flight operations at Alaska Airlines. “It means less wait time and better efficiency for ground crews ... [and] more efficient use of our aircraft, which saves fuel and helps us offer low fares.”

The Hospital Quest winner was an app called Aidin, helping patients find the best post-acute care available. It was designed by New Yorkers Mike Galbo, Russ Graney, and Janan Rajeevikaran. Their software taps the discharge management process and automatically generates lists of care providers after patients leave the hospital. This reduces administrative tasks for social workers and allows them to devote more time to patients.

The healthcare system wastes many billions every year due to inefficiencies. “At Ochsner, innovating the way we deliver patient care to maintain the highest quality and improve the patient experience is critical," says Warner Thomas, president and CEO of Ochsner Health System. "The Hospital Quest was an opportunity to identify new ways to empower patients, eliminate wait times and increase communication– before, during and after a patient's stay." Thomas said that as a Quest judge, he was "incredibly impressed with the insight, creativity and realism behind the submissions."

The complete list of winners for both Quests is available online.

The Machines Are Talking: New O’Reilly Report Says the Industrial Internet Turns Machines into Vast, Intelligent Systems, Boosts Efficiency and Innovation

A new generation of jet engines, locomotives, MRIs and other big machines loaded with sensors generating gigabytes of data and linked in networks will become more efficient to operate, easier to deploy, and more accessible to innovators, according a new report on the industrial internet published by O’Reilly Media and sponsored by GE. “The barriers between software and the physical world are falling,” the report says. “It’s becoming easier to connect big machines to networks, to harvest data from them, and control them remotely.”

The report points out that “the same changes in software and networks that brought about decades of Silicon Valley innovation are now reordering the machines around us.” It says that new, web-like software interfaces can manage the underlying complexity of machine data, “making it possible for innovators without specialized training to contribute improvements to the way the physical world works.”

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The Power of One Percent: Networks of "brilliant iron," like this aeroderivative gas turbine, could save power companies $66 billion over the next 15 years by cutting fuel use by just 1 percent.
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The GEnx jet engine can collect and analyze 5,000 data points every second, detect problems, and optimize performance.
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Speeding up trains by just 1 mph could save a railroad $200 million in annual capital and operating expenses.
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Two years ago, GE tapped Silicon Valley talent and opened a $1 billion research center in San Ramon in the Bay Area. Engineers at the center are writing code to harvest data from GE machines, build machine networks, and turn big iron like turbines and locomotives into brilliant iron. “Any machine that registers state data can become a valuable sensor when it’s connected to a network, regardless of whether it’s built for the express purpose of logging data,” the reports says. “Once a system of machines is brought together on a network, it’s easy to add new types of intelligence to the system, and to encompass more machines as the scope of optimization expands.”

One such network profiled in the report is the grid. Dennis Sumner, senior electrical engineer at Fort Collins Utilities in Colorado told O’Reilly that a $36 million investment in advanced electricity meters could pay off in 11 years just from operational savings. But since the meters can read electricity usage every 15 minutes, a 2,880-fold increase compared to human meter-readers, they also provide the utility with tremendous resolution and tools to detect outages immediately. “Previously, we didn’t know what was going on at the customer level,” Sumner said. “Imagine trying to operate a highway system if all you have are monthly traffic readings for a few spots on the road.”

Utilities blending power from traditional generation with renewables need to know how much wind electricity they can count on and when. Many wind turbines are already packed with sensors and can talk to each other like a flock of birds. “We have advanced forecasting algorithms that give us power output predictions based on the data they are receiving,” says Vic Abate, vice president of GE’s renewable energy business. “With this technology you are able to say, I am going to give you 70 megawatts over the next 15 minutes and with 99 percent accuracy.” Customers like Boston’s First Wind have already signed up for such technology.

Norfolk Southern is using GE’s Trip Optimizer software as “a kind of autopilot for locomotives,” and Movement Planner software as an “advisor and controller.” Deborah Butler, Norfolk Southern’s chief information officer, told O’Reilly that her railroad has seen a 6.3 percent reduction in fuel usage and 10 to 20 percent increases in velocity from the software.

This is just the start. Besides crunching data from locomotives and signals, Norfolk Southern has used helicopters to map its rail network. “We know where every tree is growing beside the track,” she said. “We aren’t even beginning to use that data in the way we could.”

The full report is available online.