Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501) today announced the launch of Lumada Inspection Insights, its end-to-end portfolio of digital solutions for the inspection, monitoring, and optimization of critical assets. Pioneered by Hitachi Energy and Hitachi Vantara, Lumada Inspection Insights enables customers to automate asset inspection, support sustainability goals, improve physical security, and reduce risks and impacts related to storms or fires by using powerful artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze photographs and video, including LiDAR, thermal and satellite imagery.
The launch of the new portfolio is fully aligned with Hitachi’s Mid-term Management Plan 2024 announced last month by Keiji Kojima, President & CEO, Hitachi, Ltd. In the Plan, Hitachi has set out its growth strategy and commitment to strengthening its digital and green portfolio, which is centred on the Lumada ecosystem.
Central to Hitachi’s commitment to social innovation, the Lumada ecosystem is accelerating the journey towards a sustainable society through the data-driven cycle of value co-creation with customers. The company is also focused on growing its IT/OT/Products business through constant portfolio transformation.
The new Lumada Inspection Insights portfolio addresses various root causes of failures and forced shutdowns by deploying AI and machine learning (ML) to analyze a wide spectrum of image types, assets and risks. Predictive analytics assesses the risks to operations or the environment, and organizations can streamline remediation before outages occur.
Available as a comprehensive solution or standalone, the portfolio’s four core applications are Hitachi Image-Based Inspections, Hitachi Intelligent Infrastructure Monitoring, Hitachi Vegetation Manager, and Hitachi Map. These represent the company’s latest advancements in its growing Data Operations (DataOps) and Industrial IoT offerings. More information on each solution is below.
Massimo Danieli, Managing Director of Hitachi Energy’s Grid Automation business, said, “The energy transition is one of the most urgent issues of our times and together with customers, we are co-creating pioneering digital solutions to enable the carbon-neutral future.” He added, “In collaboration with Hitachi Vantara, we are delighted to launch the Lumada Inspection Insights portfolio, which gives industrial organizations the tools they need to get the right information to the right teams when they need it most. The result is improved reliability, safety, and sustainability.”
Frank Antonysamy, Chief Digital Solutions Officer, Hitachi Vantara, said, “Becoming data-driven is essential to accelerating digitalization and sustainability.
This collaboration across Hitachi creates better outcomes for businesses, broader society and our environment by harnessing data and AI to solve multiple operational and business challenges. Together, we can improve industrial asset reliability, prevent wildfires and accelerate global sustainability efforts.”
Lumada Inspection Insights features comprehensive, microservices-based capabilities that allow visibility of assets and factors such as current state, asset health, and encroachment, in a “single pane of glass” actionable view, from a variety of sources. With these unified insights, organizations can improve safety, reliability, and agility. The use of high-resolution, autonomous, and accurate wide-area surveillance ensures that truck rolls and workforce deployments are optimized, reducing waste and furthering a sustainable approach to operations and maintenance.
Utilities around the world are dealing with unprecedented climate-related challenges. In 2021, global wildfires generated an estimated total of 6,450 megatons of CO2 equivalent – approximately 148 per cent more than the EU’s total fossil fuel emissions in 2020.
(1) These wildfires and other extreme weather events also take a significant toll on transmission lines and other utility assets, threatening worker safety and grid reliability.
“Inspection, planning and monitoring are among the most critical tasks utilities undertake to maintain grid reliability and resiliency,” said John Villali, Research Director, IDC Energy Insights. He added, “Lumada Inspection Insights combines a variety of visual asset data types with advanced analytics and AI. This empowers utilities to improve decision making, optimize operations and as a result, achieve their reliability, safety, and sustainability goals.”
(1) Source: Wildfires wreaked havoc in 2021, CAMS tracked their impact
About the four main solutions comprising Lumada Inspection Insights
Hitachi Image-Based Inspections (HIBI)
Conventional asset inspection methods, such as climbing tall towers or hanging from helicopters, put technicians at risk. Hitachi Image-Based Inspections replaces these dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming approaches by leveraging the industry’s most sophisticated AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities in one fully automated and integrated platform. This solution provides scalable image inferencing and processing to help asset managers classify assets, detect defects and categorize defect severity. It automates defect assessment, instantly preprocessing and analyzing thousands of images. The solution’s highly optimized human-in-the-loop capabilities enable continuous retraining of model-based subject matter expert input for a wide range of asset classes and image quality.
Hitachi Intelligent Infrastructure Monitoring
Utilities and other asset-intensive organizations are challenged with the need to ensure that their service territories are safe and the service they provide is reliable. To meet this goal, utilities need to have insights to prevent safety incidents or respond effectively when they happen.
Hitachi Intelligent Infrastructure Monitoring leverages video, a powerful data type that is generally utilized to a fraction of its potential. With it, organizations can gather new data through smart cameras, 3D LiDAR sensors and edge gateways, and integrate with CRM, ERP, and other sources of data as required. Operators can gain granular, continuous 3D intelligence for sensitive areas (such as substations), and find correlations, causations and real-time incidents.
Hitachi Vegetation Manager
Hitachi Vegetation Manager is the first of its kind, closed-loop vegetation resource planning solution that leverages artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of an organization’s vegetation job activities and planning efforts.
The solution utilizes images from a variety of visual sources, including photos, video, and imagery from industry-leading Maxar satellites. The incorporation of satellite technology allows utilities to cover and survey their entire territory to automatically confirm line clearances and maintain compliance with regulations. Satellite technology also provides organizations with more comprehensive insights at scale, allowing them to reduce costs and emissions by minimizing truck and helicopter trips. By combining the images with climate, ecosystem and cut plan data and machine learning algorithms, Hitachi Vegetation Manager enables instant grid-wide visibility and better insights so that organizations can optimize decision-making.
Hitachi Map
Hitachi Map is designed to be the primary interaction point for users, from field technicians looking for work orders in a specific area to a control centre team managing a city-wide outage. It’s a “single pane of glass” from which users can access essential information, make informed decisions, and take immediate action. Hitachi Map combines information from numerous applications such as EAM, APM, FSM, ADMS, GIS, and more into a single, interactive and easy-to-use geospatial view. Users have intuitive access to key information at their fingertips without having to navigate multiple systems and interpret contextual variations. This approach eliminates extra and duplicative work and reduces carbon emissions from unnecessary travel to and from a site.
