Just a few months after the launch of a joint venture designed to bring fullstream oil and gas domain knowledge together with artificial intelligence (AI), Baker Hughes, a GE company (BHGE) and C3.ai have released their first joint product. BHC3 Reliability, an AI software application, uses deep learning predictive models, natural language processing, and machine vision to predict asset reliability issues.
The BakerHughesC3.ai joint venture unveiled the new offering today in Monaco at BHGE’s Unify2019, a technology conference geared toward bringing together digital ecosystem players in oil and gas. Although the joint venture ultimately looks to use advanced AI to improve efficiencies and advance safety in oil and gas, this first product release is going after what has become a key early endeavor for AI—predictive maintenance. It continuously aggregates data from plant-wide sensor networks, enterprise systems, maintenance notes, and piping and instrumentation schematics, using historical and real-time data from entire systems to identify anomalous conditions that lead to equipment failure and process upsets.
“This application is a demonstration of how the BakerHughesC3.ai team is moving with speed to address the need for AI applications that deliver increased productivity, efficiency, and safety for oil and gas businesses,” said Derek Mathieson, chief marketing and technology officer for BHGE.
Application alerts help operators be more proactive to reduce downtime and lost revenue. The partnership between C3 and BHGE provides not only the AI capabilities but also BHGE’s oil and gas domain expertise by augmenting those alerts with failure prevention recommendations and prescriptive actions.
“Through our work together, we are uniquely positioned to deliver significant value to oil and gas companies by quickly deploying domain-specific advanced AI applications for diverse use cases across the energy value chain,” noted Ed Abbo, president and CTO of C3.
BHC3 Reliability is applicable to operations across all sectors of the energy value chain—scalable to any number of assets and processes across offshore and onshore platforms, compressor stations, refineries, and petrochemical plants.
The BakerHughesC3.ai joint venture also markets and deploys C3’s AI technology, including the C3 AI Suite and applications, into oil and gas businesses. Shell, which is deploying C3’s platform across its upstream and downstream operations, has been a strong advocate of digital progress in general and AI technology in particular. “The combination of our data science expertise and the software development expertise that C3.ai brings is really powerful,” commented Dan Jeavons, general manager of data science for Shell.
Read more about the work C3 is doing with AI in the energy sector:
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