A brand-new GE factory in Florida is feeding production data into evolutionary algorithms built on Predix — GE’s cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet — to essentially apply the principles of natural selection to capacitors and develop better products.
In the French Alps, a team of hydro engineers are using the system’s machine-learning capacity to link water turbines to the internet and bring more renewable energy onto the grid. It allows the turbine to pick up the slack when the wind stops blowing.”
And in Italy, algorithms built on Predix allowed a local utility to analyze the energy market, optimize a gas turbine and bring back online a 50-year-old power plant that had been left for dead. The software can respond to the grid when it needs more power, simulate grid conditions, make the plant available and respond quickly in a profitable way.
Top image: GE is using data and software to design better machines. Engineers at GE Power in Greenville, South Carolina, placed some 5,000 measuring instruments and sensors on this 9HA gas turbine, and another 2,000 on a compressor validation rig that absorbs its 500,000 horsepower. The detectors produced nearly 5 terabytes of data, about half the content of the printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. “The test stand allows us to obtain information about the turbine about a year earlier than in the normal development cycle,” says engineering manager Brad Carey. Above: GE Power just unveiled the digital power plant for steam. It’s using neural networks and other AI tools to control power production. Images credit: GE Power
These are just three recent examples of how GE is using data, algorithms and the Industrial Internet to bring its own plants as well as those of its customers into the second machine age defined by digital technologies.
GE has invested more than $1 billion to develop Predix and launch a new business around it called GE Digital. Today, GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh is hosting investors at the unit’s Bay Area headquarters in San Ramon, California, to discuss the latest results and also GE’s digital roadmap for the future.
Ruh said that GE was “uniquely positioned” to digitize industry because its deep knowledge of big machines, which it has been making for more than a century – he call this GE’s domain expertise – and also because of Predix. “We have a powerful combination of advanced data science, physics and engineering,” he said. “This is the winning formula.”
Ruh says that GE is on target to bring in $6 billion in digital revenues this year and that the number could grow to $15 billion by 2020.
But he stressed that this is just the beginning. He said that that by 2020 the total market for industrial software and applications will be larger than the consumer internet, reaching $225 billion.
GE plans to capture a large share of that market by opening Predix to outside developers, which it did earlier this year. Now GE software engineers, partners such as Intel, customers and independent coders can start building their applications in the platform and offering them through the Predix marketplace. Pitney Bowes, for example, is building geospatial and location intelligence apps on Predix. “Location management is a fundamental enabler,” says Roger Pilc, executive vice president and chief innovation officer at Pitney Bowes. “I’m sure other companies will be writing apps leveraging these capabilities as well. This is the power of the Predix ecosystem.”
Ruh says 20,000 developers will be working on Predix by the end of 2016. You can see the presentation slides here. You can also watch the meeting live below.
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