Proficy platform monitors more than 1,100 units in turbine fleet and provides real-time data.

Renee Robbins

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You may report to the same parent company, but that doesn't mean you win the business. However, GE Intelligent Platforms, based in Charlottesville, VA, had the technology that won over its corporate sibling, GE Energy's Performance & Reliability Center (PRC) in Atlanta. The result is that PRC has standardized on a remote monitoring and diagnostic platform that uses Proficy Historian, Proficy SOA, Proficy Workflow and Proficy Cimplicity software to monitor more than 1,100 units in GE Energy's turbine fleet.

This architecture sets the standard inside GE for remote monitoring and diagnostics platforms. "We proved that our Proficy Software's integrated capability to collect, organize, analyze, and drive work processes around massive volumes of real-time data could meet the needs of GE Energy now and into the future," according to Erik Udstuen, vice president of software and services for GE Intelligent Platforms.

The system provides GE Energy customers with real-time data on impending failures and performance diagnostics. The legacy system at GE Energy used an Oracle relational database architecture that consumed more than 50 terabytes of storage across four database instances. Over time, the legacy solution had become costly to maintain and support, and was not sufficiently extensible to sustain future growth.

"GE Intelligent Platforms delivers a solution that is flexible and scalable while lowering ongoing maintenance costs through simplified IT infrastructure and reduced storage demands. Improving availability and access to fleet data while leveraging diagnostic workflow capabilities will drive improved productivity of subject matter experts," said Justin Eggart, Performance and Reliability Center leader for GE Energy Services. "The new system will enhance our focus on delivering customer value, applying advanced Monitoring and Diagnostics solutions, while proactively managing the performance and reliability of turbines and other assets in the GE fleet."

GE Intelligent Platforms' Next Generation M&D platform (Gen X), is based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software, such as Proficy Historian. According Udstuen, Proficy Historian is a platform for data acquisition and storage designed to handle time sequence data "at speeds significantly faster than traditional relational database algorithms that simply aren't available in relational models, while also supporting a range of data compression." The result, he says, is better performance with lower disk utilization, without any loss of data resolution.

"The PRC stands as a shining example of how GE can leverage its domain expertise into Knowledge Service offerings," said Udstuen, citing GE Energy's expanding services reach.

Also key to the solution is GE's work process management backbone for application development, Proficy Workflow. Its efficient storage model creates a highly scalable software solution. The Proficy Cimplicity component is a client/server based visualization and control tool for visualizing operations, performing supervisory automation, and delivering reliable information to higher-level analytic applications. The combined result is faster responsiveness, reduced costs and increased profitability, said Udstuen.

For more information on the software solution , visit: www.ge-ip.com/operationsmanagement.

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- Edited by Renee Robbins, senior editor
Control Engineering News Desk