An industrial analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) suite is set to offer a new approach to help businesses across energy, process and hybrid industries to analyse data more effectively, deriving actionable intelligence to improve business operations.

The analytics software and services collect, contextualise and convert operational, engineering and information technology (IT) data into actionable insights that help industries improve operations, optimize asset management and streamline business processes safely and sustainably.

ABB explains that its Ability Genix Industrial Analytics and AI suite is a scalable advanced analytics platform with pre-built, easy-to-use applications and services.

The company highlights studies suggesting that industrial companies are typically able to use only 20% of the data generated, which severely limits the ability to apply data analytics meaningfully. ABB’s new solution operates as a digital data convergence point where streams of information from diverse sources across the plant and enterprise are put into context through a unified analytics model. Application of artificial intelligence on this data produces meaningful insights for prediction and optimisation, with the objective of improving business performance.

ABB Ability Genix is composed of a data analytics platform and applications, supplemented by ABB services, that aim to help customers decide which assets, processes and risk profiles can be improved and assist customers in designing and applying those analytics. Featuring a library of applications, customers can subscribe to a variety of analytics on demand, speeding up the traditional process of requesting and scheduling support from suppliers.

Scalable from plant to enterprise, the suite is able to support a variety of deployments including cloud, hybrid and on-premise and uses Microsoft Azure for integrated cloud connectivity and services.  

An additional component of the offering is the ABB Ability Edgenius operations data manager that connects, collects, and analyses operational technology data at the point of production, using data generated by operational technology such as DCS and devices to produce analytics that are aimed at improving production processes and asset utilisation. ABB Ability Edgenius can be deployed on its own, or integrated with ABB Ability Genix so that operational data is combined with other data for strategic business analytics.

The company asserts that the use of data analytics is particularly suited to the process, energy and hybrid industries, building on existing digital technology and using existing data from operations more effectively, by combining it with engineering and information technology data for multi-dimensional decision-making.

The ABB Ability Edgenius can be used to pull data from real-time control systems and make it available to predict issues and prescribe actions that help use assets better and fine-tune production processes.