From roads, highways, and bridges to electric utility substations, today’s infrastructure requires large investments, including capital and labor, to provide the upkeep required to maintain operations. The U.S. government has issued new trillion-dollar policies to not only continue maintaining these critical assets but also build and renew more to serve population growth and ensure that critical infrastructure remains secure and operationally sound. Pressures to improve infrastructure are becoming increasingly magnified, especially in the electrical power generation, transmission, and distribution sectors. In a world that is quickly embracing the electrification of everything, electricity must continue to flow 24/7, uninterrupted.
Compounding these challenges further, energy utilities are faced with the dichotomy that energy utilities are consistently challenged by high fixed costs to keep their infrastructure functional and secure. They have to balance regulatory restrictions and budgetary issues, causing them to be very careful when it comes to prioritizing modernization efforts.
These growing challenges may need to be addressed manually if automated response is not yet in play. Similarly, if monitoring and predictive strategies are not yet a given, the current challenge playbook may require reacting to incidents as they occur. Utilities must maintain a delicate balance between increasing operational costs of system downtime, accident prevention, pressures on system upkeep because of climate change, security demands (including from cyberattacks) and more, all while finding new sources of revenue growth and enhancing customer satisfaction.
To improve their operations and enhance safety and security measures, utilities require newer and more efficient methods of collecting data, resulting in faster and better insights into these challenges. This is possible thanks to the ubiquitous power and nature of IoT and the host of sensors used, including video specific sensors (both visible spectrum and thermal). Efficient monitoring should be remote-capable and enable the required processes to start capturing and utilizing data via various types of feeds, including video streams, and perform analytics to provide insights, alerts, and targeted reporting.
Thermal data and visual image capturing
Hitachi Smart Spaces and Hitachi Video Insights provide real time information that operations officials need to build a safer, more predictive, remote-friendly, and efficient operations and maintenance strategy.
This end-to-end solution allows for remote inspection and monitoring of critical infrastructure of electrical substations. It includes visual spectrum and the use of thermal video cameras, ruggedized PCs, edge, and cloud applications, and AI-powered data analytics software to support remote monitoring and inspection for increased autonomous operations.
Hitachi utilizes the latest technologies to design solutions that provide the best value by maximizing the sensors’ functionality and coverage
Position cameras to achieve best line of sight
Remote monitoring is achieved as a base concept by utilizing network video and thermal equipment along with cloud-hosted applications that allow remote connection to the different sites and viewing live, playback, export and control video, and thermal cameras.
Benefits
Remote inspections are enabled using pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) presets in the installed cameras that show the components and items under inspection in great detail.
APM is designed to provide health and performance insights to prevent critical asset failures while optimizing asset lifecycle costs. Leverage online and offline data to drive more intelligent, risk-based approaches to asset management.
EAM delivers business outcomes at a sustainable and superior cost of operations and capital investment. EAM instills best practices and processes to help you manage assets from day to day and throughout their lifecycle.
FSM is a highly scalable and intuitive inspection, maintenance, and repair application. Designed for asset-intensive environments like substations, FSM equips mobile users to execute work orders in the field with optimal efficiency.
Benefits
Using predefined camera presets and tasks, an orchestrator application runs schedules and monitors user input activity, enabling the cameras to collect data autonomously. All collected data is stored in the Hitachi Visualization Suite (HVS) software, which is available via a web user interface, mobile application, or through other applications via an API (Application Programming Interface) with authorized access to the data.
The goal of the autonomous data collection is to gather enough information for AI models to be built. Typically, AI models require annotated samples for each use case, with tens to hundreds of images: The more images, the more accurate the prediction will be. These images should represent the possible visual conditions, like day and night, sun or shade, dry or wet conditions, and any other combination, including snow or debris. The AI model goes through continuous training to detect what a normal state looks like, and eventually any state that shows a decrement of confidence gets highlighted as an alert or event for an operator to review and respond to. Once enough information is available to identify specific defects or equipment states, they will be added to the list of events that can be detected.
Benefits
Autonomous substation monitoring is achieved once the AI models are built, processed, trained, and are considered robust for ongoing successful analysis. The system performs image validation, updates the KPIs, and identifies trends defined in visualization dashboards.
These dashboards can be composed from a variety of shapes and trends, and they can be customized using the C-Tools component of the application. Some examples are below:
Hitachi Visualization Suite allows you to view individual events as they are displayed in the map. You can see the associated images, thermal data and metadata pushed by the autonomous data collection applications, as well as live, playback, export and pan-tilt-zoom control.
HVS also has video wall capabilities, so a variety of configurations, from 2×2 to 8×8, can be stored, each with the applicable cameras per use case, site or as desired by the operators.
Operators simply drag and drop cameras from the camera list menu and save the video walls. These can be recalled at any time, on demand.
Additional HVS functionality like email notifications and incident management allows real-time notification outside the platform, and it provides a tool to manage conditions outside the of the normal operation of the substation.
Benefits
At Hitachi, we view the modern substation as a critical hub that requires consistent attention maintain consistent power delivery to its surrounding communities. Hitachi brings together people and technology through the power of data intelligence to achieve three basic goals:
Enabling efficiencies, harnessing data and maintaining an extensive asset ecosystem require a partner like Hitachi to support your organization with an integrated, automated solution that can scale as your needs change.
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