Automation and digitalization - helping industry leaders with insights and intelligence for decisions

Digitalization is about seamlessly connecting sensors, devices, machines, processes, discrete automationof tasks/functions and users. In an interaction with the Editor of siliconindia, Akilur Rahman, Chief Technology Officer, Hitachi Energy India, shares his thoughts on how digitalization strategy and executions playing a vital role in India and how technology is solving complex areas such as energy and power Business.

With more than three decades of experience in the field of energy and automation technologies, Akilur has held several leadership positions in ABB and Hitachi Energy ranging from Head of Global Automation Product Development and Integration to Global Head of Cyber Security and Engineering in Process Automation. Following this, he was also the Head of ABB Corporate Research Center, Bengaluru, where he instilled higher collaboration toward global research & development, engineering, and innovation to develop technology & tools with faster time to market. With power industry being on the cusp of energy and digital transformation, Akilur is observing tremendous opportunities for leaders to accelerate the transformation with convergence of core domain technologies, automation, and digitalization.

Enlighten us on digitalization, on a broader perspective.

Today, everyone is talking about digitalization, but it has been in the electrical and power industry for several decades. Thirty-fiveyears ago, I was developing software for digital simulation of high voltage DC (HVDC) system and analysis based on advanced mathematical techniques and algorithms. It's all about automation before digitalization from a general perspective and specific to my domain. Whether you automate a particular product manufacturing and its application, the product itself does some automation in the industry or production - be it a sensor, actuator, device, machine, robot, controller, or analyser. In every sector, it has been there; think about any business, whether it's a production process or services, there are different things (in the parlance of IoT), flow of tasks - sequential as well as concurrent. Over the years, automation has been implemented discretely in specific task, group of tasks, sub-process, and sub-system level, leaving gaps with in-efficient manual interventions in between.Nowadays, with emergence of in-expensive sensors, cloud services, easy connectivity among things (of IoT) and digital technologies, gaps can be bridged with end-to-end automation of processes and transactions in (near) real-time. Industry leaders can focus more on analysing data and processes to make them efficient in real-time rather than waiting for reports of past to carry out post-mortem of inefficiencies and failures. This is what digitalisation on top of automation means and delivers for industries.

What are the advancements in Operational Technology?

In electric power domain, operational technology includes computer-based communication, automation, protection and control - be it at endpoint, edge, computer or server level including large network. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it started with small computers (minicomputers at that time) in substations to provide advanced functional and communication capability.It evolved with connected sensors, servers, SCADA, Network Control, and Network Management deployed in large power systems. A mission-critical system like power works very sophisticatedly. It is a set of very advanced mathematical algorithms. Nevertheless, it's a much-closed loopkind of system because it has to work perfectly without any disturbance in real-time.

Similarly, operational automation technology in continuous and discrete manufacturing industries has been there since many decades including robotics, that is witnessing more and morefruition now. Distributed control and manufacturing execution system software together with advanced sensors, actuators, controllers, robots, intelligent devices and machines have come of age. Whereas the closed-loop system is already having working automation, automatic control, ensuring base level of performance improvement in the processes and assets.

Elaborate more on digitalization strategy and its execution in energy industry.

Having established smart automation, we additionally take the data from sensors, or maybe we put new sensors on a machine or a system and then construct an IOT system. Therefore, we can have additional real-time information about assets and operations of energy system.

Data is available to larger set of experts in the same company: plants and corporate offices, to customers, partners, OEMs, etc. If, let's say, a machine or equipment is malfunctioning, about to fail, or is not operating in a very efficient condition, system can predict it based on data analytics, AI-ML algorithm Additionally, the data is available to experts for analysing it and recommending prescriptive actions to improve it further. 

As a country, we have been progressing in digitalization from end to end.The key here is enriching learning experience and upgrading to new technologies. We need to understand the application of technologies, whether the core technology, automation, or robotics, and how the end-users and market perceive it. We have digital technologies and solutions including sophisticated sensors, monitoring, cloud-based Asset and Work Performance Management, diver robots for inspection of transformers, AI-ML based forecasting applications, autonomous protection, etc. Many a times, we are ahead in the technology development, but it takes time for the market and customers to adapt, especially in the power, energy and industrial domains. That being a critical infrastructure, reliability and availability are of supreme importance as interruption of asset or operation even in fraction of seconds (i.e., in milliseconds) can cause cascaded tripping leading to black-outs. We do proof of concept in addition to testingit rigorously with several simulated use case scenarios, and then the customers and the end-users get confidence. The latest is a digital twin of a complex electrical installation with high voltage power electronics based real-time control, multi-physics 4D model, asset performance management, AR-VR and predictive-prescriptive operation &maintenance concepts. This not only provides step improvement in performance of the system, but also provides upskilling for the leaders and workforce for energy system under transition.

How do you see the future of automation in India?

Automation is the backbone for digitalization to achieve higher level of productivityand quality. It can provide us the opportunity in India especially. Suppose we want to rapidly scale up the production and servicesat the same time ensuring improved efficiency and reliability. In that case, we also need to sort in India because most of the industry people see automation means replacement of human workers or human experts. I would say it’s not about replacement, rather displacement from mundane repetitive, sometimes unsafe tasks to new roles with application of human intelligence - being it top leaders or workforce on the ground. Theyneedto be motivated and trained to use automation to analyse data and process to make the production andservicesfurther efficient.

I also gave an example earlier, that automation implementation often starts discretely. For example, out of 20 tasks/steps in a connected system, transaction, or process, maybe you start automating five tasks, but the higher value comes when you do it end to end. That’s the essence of digitalization. Therefore, a systematic holistic approach with continuous improvement program can make you connect all these automation processes seamlessly to achieve the business targets. With automation and digitalization, we are creating augmented intelligent system using human and machine intelligence. The entire industry workforce can learn to work with the evolving industry and energy transformation.

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