Unexpected downtime costs industries billions of dollars each year, and the challenges of aging assets combined with many experienced professionals at or near retirement age have companies looking at the promises of IoT technology for answers.

The Netherlands are well-known for their inland waterways, canals, sluices and of course port activities. The Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure indicates that there are thousands of buoys and fixed items in and near water environments that would profit from IoT monitoring. One of the problems with buoys for example, is that they get hit by ships and the anchor cable breaks. Without connectivity, it takes quite some time to find out that something has happened with that buoy. Not to mention the costs of renting a boat to go to the buoy to fix it. Another important issue, is that there is no real-time monitoring of the buoys at this moment. Only by physically visiting the object on the water, one gains insight in its status.

To reduce maintenance costs and delay-causing failures for Deutsche Bahn. They need manual measurements by a position measurement system based on custom-made MEMS sensor clusters, which allow autonomous and continuous monitoring with wireless data transmission and long battery. They were looking for data pre-processing solution in the sensor and machine learning algorithms in the cloud so as to detect critical wear.

Given low power prices maintained by stagnant demand growth, a customer’s combined cycle power plant was staffed as leanly as possible. As such, a change in operational parameters went unnoticed by engineers at the plant.

Locate software to deliver continuing maintenance planning functionality while providing the flexibility for growth and costs savings. The investment to keep home-grown application in pace with growing business is over $1 million.

London Underground serves 1.7 billion passengers per year and the Victoria Line accounts for 213 million of those journeys. The line carries 89.1 million passengers per year in the peak service, offering the most intensive service on the underground network. Over the past eight years, a £1 billion investment programme upgraded and replaced the Victoria Line’s rolling stock and signaling and control systems to deliver a service capable of running more than 33 trains per hour. The new signalling system uses 385 Jointless Track Circuits (JTCs) to detect train position, maintain safe train separation and deliver train headways capable of meeting an extremely demanding timetable. Track circuits are the sole means of train detection and play a critical role in the safe and reliable operation of the railway; however, no provision was made for any condition monitoring during the design and installation. Because of the critical nature of the asset, a failed track circuit has a major impact on the service and constitutes the biggest cause of passenger disbenefit on the Victoria Line, amounting to £1.5 million since their introduction (London Underground CuPID database for Track Circuit failures since 2012). The Victoria Line Condition Monitoring Team, made up of six professional engineers with rail, software, electrical, mechanical, network and engineering backgrounds, delivered the solution. National Instruments Silver Alliance Partner Simplicity AI supported the project by providing additional software consulting services. We used the company’s enormous breadth of expertise to deliver the system onto an operational railway within one year of the concept design. The scope of this project consisted of designing, integrating and installing an intelligent remote condition monitoring system that could perform real-time analysis of voltage and frequency for all 385 JTCs across a 45 km of deep tube railway to predict and prevent failures and subsequent loss of passenger service. We took advantage of the accuracy, reliability and flexibility of NI hardware and software to implement an innovative system to reduce the lost customer hours experienced on the Victoria Line. The system is forecast to reduce lost customer hours by 39,000 per year—an estimated £350,000 savings per year in passenger disbenefit.

Today's healthcare providers face a daunting challenge: sustaining or improving patient care levels despite shortages of clinicians and nurses, increasing competition, and financial pressure.

Since 1999, Marathon has been utilizing Asset Performance Management (APM) from Meridium (now acquired by GE Digital) for its day-to-day reliability needs across a number of its business units, and currently has over 1,300 APM users. After implementing SAP, Marathon found that the modules were deeply customized and difficult to adapt to the existing reliability program. As a result, Marathon began looking into how to improve its overall operational support

To achieve its goal of doubling production capacity while keeping tight control of costs, major shoe manufacturer PT Chang Shin Indonesia set out to unlock greater efficiencies in its operations.

Petropriar, S.A., a subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., owns and operates oil and natural gas reserves in the country’s Orinoco Belt. Petropriar needed an easy way to manage the inspection of its rotating electrical and static equipment at one of its industrial complexes.

5678 SMRT needed a fast, modern, scalable web reporting solution that could be accessed by numerous operators over many and diverse divisions. They wanted to extend and enhance their current HMI system, in which they had invested significant time and money, without having to replace it.

Chinese chemical subsidiary of multinational corporation serves customers throughout the world. Sales offices and research and technology centers are strategically located to provide rapid response to customer requests. Just two workers were assigned to maintain thousands of intelligent instruments in three production units, so they could do little more than react to device issues as they appeared. This costly maintenance method inevitably led to unexpected downtime when a critical instrument failed. Plant management recognized the need to change from reactive to predictive maintenance for all assets, including instruments and control valves, but help was needed in implementing such a technology-based initiative.

Ash Grove Cement would like to find a solution in automate maintenance data collection at each facility for a well-defined enterprise asset management process to support equipment performance reliability.

Doug Gilroy and Mark Bayrock of Advanced Audio Concepts, a Vancouver-based systems integrator, were given free reign to design, install and operate River Rock's complex surveillance system. Gilroy had freedom to design the system with several unique aspects, such as the use of video balun technology to integrate quickly, and an innovative design in the tech room that makes it easier for the operator to spot problems. The integrators also had a long-standing relationship with Honeywell and chose to use Honeywell products almost exclusively throughout the installation.

Prior to 1990, most Danish electric power was produced at large, centralized generation plants from which it was transmitted and distributed to commercial, industrial, and residential consumers. Since then, thousands of distributed generators have been added such that the installed generation capacity at the distribution level exceeds the generation capacity at the transmission level. The distributed generation (DG) assets include dispersed combined heat and power (CHP) plants and wind turbines, creating a “carpet” of generation at the low and medium voltage levels of the distribution system (see inset). These distributed resources provide renewable and flexible energy production and support local thermal heating loads but were designed to operate only while grid-connected and could not be used in the case of a major power outage. The high penetration of variable wind generation also created the situation where the transmission system had to balance all the local variability of wind (both real and reactive power).

The Bellagio Hotel needed a fast, accurate system to detect problems and alert maintenance employees to a malfunctioning fountain. The fountains are a contributor to the hotels revenues, and a failure can cost the hotel millions in sales and repairs.

Best Buy wanted to quickly develop and deploy apps to achieve business goals. Also, create apps that are scalable and low-maintenance.

Between 2005 and 2010, Aluar went through a substantial growth phase where most of the production facilities were upgraded. As a result of this expansion, the number of PLCs increased from 100 to 300. When it came to managing the control program software, however, flaws and cracks began to show in the established workflow and version control procedures that had prior to the growth phase, been based on manual backups and documentation. A rapid growth in the number of automation and maintenance staff (>100 users) also coincided with increasing accounts of infrequent and incomplete documentation of software versions, which then required an increasing effort where bug tracing and detection were concerned. This increased the risk of incidents that could not only affect operation, but that could also result in stoppages at the mid-term. It also increased the risk of safety risks remaining undetected.