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Digital check-up: How GE is using data to drive better machine health

June 01, 2018
Digital. You hear the word everywhere, but what does it do? What can it do?

Penn State University recently hosted a digital capability evaluation in partnership with the US Army. They reached out to the entire software industry, including GE, to demonstrate our abilities in condition-based maintenance on 72 Army ground vehicles.

Condition-based maintenance is a digital service that uses internal algorithms and machine learning techniques to identify vehicles that require major maintenance action. This alert allows the customer to execute maintenance actions proactively to prevent downtime and safety risks.

GE collected time series data from these vehicles, cleansed and pre-processed it, and then used machine learning techniques to identify ’healthy behavior’ for this class of ground vehicle. The team then used that data to build algorithms for future data to flow through to help detect anomalies or deviations from the normal data set that may indicate that maintenance is required.

Our GE Aviation Digital Solutions team worked in partnership with the GE Global Research Center (GRC) and GE Digital over the course of six weeks to build a package of digital services for the Army to implement and test. “Recently, our team spent a half day at the Pentagon reporting our findings to the Army’s Director of Maintenance and the Penn State team, and Penn State then provided a report to the US Army with their findings,” says Brian Clements, Sr Staff Analytics Engineer.

“The feedback from the Army and Penn State has been very positive,” he continues.

GE’s expertise in this area stems from a foundation of internal implementation on industrial applications. We can then take the learnings and best practices that we identify in using the product ourselves and build an even more sophisticated product for our customers.  This allows us not only to offer general machine learning capabilities, but to apply them in a way that provides valuable insights to action for our customers.

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GE Aerospace is a world-leading provider of jet and turboprop engines, as well as integrated systems for commercial, military, business and general aviation aircraft.