Foresight: Autonomous machine monitoring and prognostics system for the Oil and Gas and Maritime sectors

Descrizione del progetto

Sensori per monitorare lo stato di salute dei macchinari navali in tempo reale

Il controllo delle condizioni delle macchine a bordo delle navi dovrebbe essere possibile in tempo reale con il clic di un pulsante. Oggi nel settore marittimo, solo una piccola percentuale della flotta mondiale dispone di sensori utilizzati per ispezioni digitali. Questo progetto Foresight, finanziato dall’UE, sta sviluppando una tecnologia economica e di facile interpretazione che consentirà agli equipaggi di monitorare lo stato di salute dei macchinari in tempo reale, consentendo all’equipaggio di prevedere e intraprendere le azioni più appropriate. Utilizzando sensori perimetrali che monitorano continuamente i macchinari ed elaborano dati a livello locale, il risultato viene fuso in un indice di salute complessivo. La soluzione Foresight riduce i costi di manutenzione, elimina la necessità di un esperto tecnico a bordo e riduce al minimo eventuali tempi di fermo imprevisti.

Obiettivo

Maintenance processes applied on vessels and offshore platforms are obsolete. The technologies commonly applied to monitor machinery generate Gigabytes of technical data, requiring an expert to process it. Data cannot be handled by real-time monitoring services onshore, as the data connections available offshore are not designed for such flows. As a result, only 2% of the Mobile Drilling Units (MODUs) fleet in operation nowadays implement a real-time machinery monitoring, while the other 98% apply the out-dated Time-Based Maintenance (TBM) model. TBM increases lifecycle costs due to unexpected downtimes, higher labour costs and waste of parts in working condition. MODUs and platforms are bearing today unnecessary and excessive costs due to inefficient maintenance, even human injuries or environmental catastrophes are more likely to happen due to unmaintained machinery.
Our technology provides to vessels’ and platforms’ crews the possibility to monitor machinery health in real-time, allowing them to forecast and undertake the most appropriate actions. Foresight’s hardware is composed mainly by vibration monitoring equipment, that grant an easy installation onto any type of machinery. Foresight’s sensors continuously monitor the machinery, collect data, process them to reduce the size of the data packets and send them to the software on the cloud. Foresight Machine Learning (ML) module holistically processes the data gathered by sensors, synthesizing them into a comprehensive Health Index. It outperforms competitors in speed and reliability and is able to autonomously adapt and tailor its calculations on each machinery nominal behaviour.
Foresight relieves vessels and platforms maintenance costs by: (1) lowering the number of sensors needed; (2) reducing data communication needs; (3) removing the need for a technical expert onboard (4) minimising unexpected downtimes; (5) avoiding replacement of sound parts.