ABB And IBM Partner in Industrial Artificial Intelligence Solutions

April 26, 2017

A strategic collaboration between ABB and IBM will bring together ABB’s digital offering, ABB Ability, with IBM Watson Internet of Things’ cognitive capabilities to unlock new value for customers in utilities, industry, and transport and infrastructure.

The new suite of solutions developed by ABB and IBM will help companies address some of their biggest industrial challenges, such as improving quality control, reducing downtime, and increasing speed and yield of industrial processes. These solutions will move beyond current connected systems that simply gather data, to cognitive industrial machines that use data to understand, sense, reason and take actions supporting workers to help eliminate inefficient processes and redundant tasks.

“This powerful combination marks truly the next level of industrial technology, moving beyond current connected systems that simply gather data, to industrial operations and machines that use data to sense, analyze, optimize and take actions that drive greater uptime, speed and yield for industrial customers,” says ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer. “With an installed base of 70 million connected devices, 70,000 digital control systems and 6,000 enterprise software solutions, ABB is a trusted leader in the industrial space, and has a four decade long history of creating digital solutions for customers. IBM is a leader in artificial intelligence and cognitive computing. Together, IBM and ABB will create powerful solutions for customers to benefit from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Bringing real-time cognitive insights to smart grids ABB and IBM will apply Watson’s capabilities to predict supply patterns in electricity generation and demand from historical and weather data, to help utilities optimize the operation and maintenance of mart grids, which are facing greater complexity created by a new combination of conventional and renewable power sources. Forecasts of temperature, sunshine and wind speed will be used to predict consumption demand, which will help utilities determine optimal load management as well as real-time pricing.

Bringing real-time cognitive insights to the factory floor ABB and IBM will leverage Watson’s artificial intelligence to help find defects via real-time production images that are captured through an ABB system, and then analyzed using IBM Watson IoT for Manufacturing. Previously, these inspections were done manually, which was often a slow and error-prone process.