Maintenance & Reliability meets AI & IOT
I attended the 32nd International Maintenance Conference last week. This was my first time attending this event ever. It is an event for reliability and maintenance of industrial assets.
IMC-2017 is for Maintenance Reliability leaders, Asset Managers and anyone who is involved with Condition Monitoring. IMC-2017 will benefit anyone who is responsible for planning, scheduling, managing, or implementing any part of an organization’s maintenance reliability, operational excellence, or asset management function.
The overall theme at the conference was the onset of Digitization. And about 15% of the sessions were dedicated to AI, Industrial IoT, IoT for Conditional Monitoring, and PdM (Predictive Maintenance).
While the agenda listed AI as Artificial Intelligence, in the actual presentations, all companies startups and big/established alike, stressed on AI being Augmented Intelligence. Augmented as in — the data from sensors, and IoT would feed into Machine Learning but the final decision would be guided and contextualized by the reliability and maintenance engineers.
The other acronym that was prevalent at the conference was IoCM — Internet of Condition Monitoring — in essence using IoT & sensors to monitor the condition of machines for the purpose of maintenance, and reliability.
Here is the interesting thing, AI — both machine learning and deep learning for machines is devoid of trying to understand subjective or emotional data that is dominant in trying to understand human behavior. Machine data is completely objective. And to me that implies gathering context, without humans, would be easier than that for eCommerce or advertising.
