Technical and Engineering Decisions That Drive Choices for Predictive Analytics of Plant Data

Power generation has the goal of maximizing power output while minimizing operations and maintenance cost. The challenge for plant manager is to move closer to reliability limits while being confident the risks of any decision are understood. To attain their goals and meet this challenge they are coming to realize that they must have frequent, accurate assessment of equipment operating conditions, and a path to continued innovation-. At a typical plant, making this assessment involves the collection and effective analysis of reams of complex, interrelated production system data, including demand requirements, load, ambient temperature, as well as the dependent equipment data. Wind turbine health and performance data is available from periodic and real-time systems. To obtain the timeliest understanding of equipment health for all the key resources in a large plant or fleet, engineers increasingly turn to real-time, model-based solutions. Real-time systems are capable of creating actionable intelligence from large amounts and diverse sources of current data. They can automatically detect problems and provide the basis for diagnosis and prioritization effectively for many problems, and they can make periodic inspection methods much more efficient. Technology exists to facilitate prediction of when assets will fail, allowing engineers to target maintenance costs more effectively. But, it is critical to select the best predictive analytics for your plant. How do you make that choice correctly? Real-time condition monitoring and analysis tools need to be matched to engineering process capability. Tools are employed at the plant in lean, hectic environments; others are deployed from central monitoring centers charged with concentrating scarce resources to efficiently support plants. Applications must be flexible and simple to implement and use. Choices made in selection of new tools can be very important to future success of plant operations. So, these choices require solid understanding of the problems to be solved and the advantages and trade-offs of potential solutions. This choice of the best Predictive Analytic solution will be discussed in terms of key technology elements and key engineering elements.