The goals of this thesis were to explore the how Industrial Internet solutions could be utilized in power plants and their automation. The contents include a market analysis of the current Industrial Internet market and an analysis on the situation of competing power plant and automation system suppliers. Additionally, this thesis explains the different components of an Industrial Internet platform and studies how such a platform can be utilized to create a real-time process monitoring application for a power plant.
The Industrial Internet market situation is currently in a very fast moving state, however there is no clear market shareholder that has risen above the rest. Analyzing the Industrial Internet offering of companies such as GE, Siemens and ABB lead to the conclusion that many companies are developing their own visions of Industrial Internet platforms, but none have yet to offer anything very advanced or even complete.
These Industrial Internet platforms that are being developed can be summarized to be collections of components and tools that allow the utilization of advanced data collection and analytics capabilities. The key components include data sources, data pipelines, central storage, analytics, visualizations and security. Utilizing these components in the Valmet Industrial platform, this thesis presents a practical implementation of dashboards that can be used to monitor the performance of a power plant. The finished application allows a customer’s production manager to monitor process performance from any device over the internet and provides easy access to data in support of business decisions and to analyze any problematic parts of key processes.
Finally, methods on how these newly developed capabilities can be utilized and integrated into business opportunities are studied to explain how the Industrial Internet platform can be utilized to improve current offerings and provide new products and services in the future. For example, predictive maintenance models can provide the capability to optimize maintenance routines and prevent process downtime. This is a logical next step to research when developing new features into the created platform. Moreover, the combination of Industrial Internet capabilities with new technologies such as virtual reality, drones and blockchains can bring completely new business opportunities in the future
