Future of smart inventory for turbine components
Manufacturers of wind turbines are operating worldwide offering their services far beyond sales - such as maintenance or repair services. However, the turbines are distributed worldwide and are therefore maintained by different providers. Thus, General Electric is looking for digital solutions to provide a digital-mappable inventory of the manufacturer's wind turbine fleet components that have been installed and modified in recent years, as well as a long-term system to have real-time and up-to-date turbine component information.
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Here is some important information, that you should consider when working on this challenge. All information given can be downloaded via the tab 'Submission'.
The solution for the challenge should be elaborated keeping in mind the following tracks:
Data Collection
Currently, there are 50,000 wind turbines in the fleet. In recent years, various components have been replaced, but there is no available information on this.
However, this information is highly relevant for the long-term and sustainable maintenance of the fleet. Currently, there is no automatic way to read and store information about these components.
Here we are looking for a solution to capture and digitally store the information about all serialized parts in the turbines with little effort and automatically.
The solutions could be in the direction of scanning hardware and held data capture devices.
Digital Inventory
Once the data is collected, it needs to be appropriately architected and clustered for long-term use, recall and sharing. We want to create a new data frame structure that includes turbine components, modifications, and compositions of the turbine operating parts.
Here you should illustrate how such a database would look like and how the data can flow in, including the data about the upcoming modifications of the component in the turbines based on the solution for data collection - which categorization is relevant and how should the individual information as well as hierarchies between the components and their differentiation be presented. What would such a comprehensive data architecture look like?
Digital Thread
Finally, a dynamic system is to be developed that will make it possible to track and trace the changes in the turbine components in the future. Not only the technology and architecture of the system should be developed, but also the concept of how the data will automatically flow in (based on the previous tasks). Furthermore, the information from the various PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems as well as data collection methods must also be integrated into the database - for example, the information about the components from the development or design phase, as well as the changes over time. Which technologies are needed for this, how will they be made available to the technician and how is it to be ensured that the database is kept up to date?
Guiding Questions
- How do we read/collect the data from the already installed components?
- How do we get the different information from various data sources (like PLM systems) into a central interface so that the information about the individual current and past components in the turbines can be called up independent of location?
- How should the different formats be integrated into one tool?
- How to create a structure that integrates future new entries across the components, in addition to mapping the given data.
- How and by whom can/should the database be filled with the new elements as well as component information in the future?
- What can be derived for the maintenance processes from this solution?
- Which additional functionalities and possibilities can this solution be equipped with?