Manufacturers need to harness data from their plants to make informed decisions for optimised plant operations and maintenance.
Although plant operators are keen to use data-driven insights to make informed decisions like tuning the process parameters, due to a lack of tools, critical business decisions often depend on operators’ knowledge and recall, which can lead to biased decisions. For example, a plant manager might only respond to symptomatic conditions such as high pressure or temperatures in a boiler in a plant without understanding the root causes behind it.
TCS Cognitive Plant Operations Adviser uses available data to provide operators better insights and visibility for real-time decision-making. It addresses wastage reduction, increased equipment uptime, near zero safety incidents, improved production yield, and lower gas emissions.
Developed on Microsoft Azure, the solution helps to rapidly build and deploy cutting-edge digital solutions. Azure cloud-based platform helps to unlock the power of knowledge, data, and engineering sciences to make industrial plants more intelligent and future-ready. It can help improve product quality, reduce cognitive load on operators, increase product yield, and minimise safety incidents in a plant.
The solution brings together all core elements within a plant—product, process, equipment, plant to Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), engineering drawings—to build intelligent digital twins (a virtual model perfectly reflecting a physical object) of not just plants, systems, and processes, but operators too. Digital twins, along with AI-ML algorithms, can help in self-monitoring, self-diagnosis, self-optimisation, and self-learning of plant processes.
CPO Adviser’s built-in capabilities also help make operations predictive, prescriptive, and self-aware with causal reasoning to reduce operations and maintenance costs, improve product quality, reduce emissions, drive additional revenue via increased throughput, and make production lines more agile and safe.
TCS Cognitive Plant Operations Adviser is a composite AI solution for manufacturing and process operations that uses Microsoft Project Bonsai low-code, AI platform to provide insights and information to operators for taking real-time and autonomous decisions. The solution integrates with Microsoft Azure private MEC to help operators reduce waste, increase equipment uptime, and zero-out safety incidents.
The TCS solution does this by bringing together all core elements needed to build intelligent digital twins of the plants, systems, processes, and plant operation through the curation and reasoning of digitally captured domain and tacit knowledge. It delivers high-capacity compute capability with secure, reliable network connectivity at the production site, supporting self-monitoring, self-diagnosing, self-optimising, and self-learning capabilities.
“We are helping our clients with plant operations to build predictive and prescriptive capabilities into their production for superior outcomes using powerful cognitive and edge compute capabilities. We are delighted to launch the 5G-enabled TCS Cognitive Plant Operations Adviser solution, as part of our Enterprise 5G Edge suite of solutions on Microsoft Azure,” said Siva Ganesan, head, Microsoft Business Unit, TCS.
“The convergence of edge compute, 5G networking and AI simplifies the design and delivery of modern connected applications like TCS’ Cognitive Plant Operations Adviser, driving factory automation, worker safety, productivity, and sustainability for global manufacturers. Leveraging Azure services brings simplicity to deliver and manage the solution at scale.”
