Amazon Web Services (AWS) has created a new service to help customers perform predictive maintenance on the equipment in their facilities. Amazon Lookout for Equipment uses AWS-developed machine learning models to ingest sensor data from a customer’s industrial equipment. The real-time data streams from the sensors may relate to pressure, flow rate, RPMs, temperature or power.
Lookout for Equipment uses machine learning on the data to predict early warning signs of machine failure or suboptimal performance.
Customers pay for the amount of data ingested, the compute hours used to train a custom model and the number of inference-hours used.
AWS says companies have a lot of equipment sensors, and to date they typically use simple rules or modeling approaches to identify issues based on past performance. But it says these measures are “rudimentary.”
Faster warnings and resolving more complex issues require machine learning. “Today, advances in machine learning techniques have made it possible to quickly identify anomalies and learn the unique relationships between each piece of equipment’s historical data,” states AWS.
But obviously, not all companies can hire a machine learning expert to build custom models to analyze the data from their industrial equipment. And even if they could afford an in-house machine learning expert, these folks are hard to find.
With Amazon Lookout for Equipment, industrial and manufacturing customers can quickly build a predictive maintenance solution for an entire facility or across multiple locations. Customers must upload their sensor data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The service will automatically analyze the data, assess normal or healthy patterns and build a machine learning model that is tailored to the customer’s environment.
The AWS technology will then use the custom-built machine learning model to analyze incoming sensor data and identify early warning signs of machine failure or malfunction. For each alert, the service will specify which sensors are indicating an issue and measure the magnitude of its impact on the detected event.
Amazon Lookout for Equipment is available today in U.S. East (N. Virginia), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Seoul), with availability in additional regions in the coming months.
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