Industrial Prescriptive Analytics

What is Prescriptive Analytics?

Prescriptive analytics uses advanced analytical techniques to determine optimal courses of action to achieve the best possible outcome in a given scenario. This is contrasted with “Descriptive Analytics”, which describes situations and data, and “Predictive Analytics”, which is future estimates of one or more variables. Prescriptive analytics uses insights from data and predictive models combined with decision and optimization algorithms to provide recommendations for how you can optimize and control your processes, strategies, and operations. It generally recommends or directly takes courses of action to achieve a future outcome.

Industrial prescriptive analytics takes the concept of prescriptive analytics and applies it to an industrial setting. Examples of industrial prescriptive analytics include predictive maintenance in manufacturing, production optimization in oil and gas, and supply chain optimization in logistics.

In each case, industrial prescriptive analytics draws on data from all parts of your processes — such as historical lab test data, materials data, sensor data, and operational data — to create an accurate picture of the process. This information is fed to advanced algorithms such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, and simulation to predict future performance and provide recommendations for attaining it.

Benefits: Why Prescriptive Analytics is Important to Your Business

The advantage of industrial prescriptive analytics is that it can quickly identify key performance drivers and provide a better understanding, decision-making and actions to improve your processes, strategies, allocations, routing, product performance, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), business goals, and much more.

Improves Industrial Processes

Industrial prescriptive analytics can identify improvement opportunities and recommend relevant changes in the operations of your industrial processes. For example, in oil and gas, production for each well can be controlled to a setpoint that maximizes the throughput in the downstream production piping networks. This way, more oil can be produced at a lower cost from existing facilities without physical changes, associated downtimes, capital expenses, etc. In assembly operations, subassemblies can be matched so that all resulting products are within specifications, eliminating waste and rework and leaving no part unmatched.

Increases efficiency and cost-effectiveness

Industrial prescriptive analytics helps you save time and resources, increase production, improve quality, reduce rework, and more by quickly identifying areas of improvement and suggesting the most efficient solution through data-driven insights. This will provide you with competitive advantages over those without such predictive analytics.

Reduces risks associated with decision making

Commonly working with an operations model, industrial prescriptive analytics evaluates alternative strategies to deliver a near-optimal strategy without the risk of disturbing the actual processes. Hard constraints ensure that solutions are reasonable actions within operational boundaries.

How to Implement Prescriptive Analytics

Identify the need for industrial prescriptive analytics

The first step in implementing prescriptive analytics is identifying the need. Look at your current processes and determine where improvements can be made, and quantify the business benefit. Prioritize this list based on business benefits and establish the first project at the top of the list. IntelliDynamics offers “Opportunity Workshops” that do exactly this with you, the stakeholders, and the experts in your organization.

Identify key data

Brainstorm all the relevant factors within your systems that may influence the performance you wish to improve. Error on the side of too much data, as the analytics will sort out the key drivers. Identify where that information is located (distributed control systems, SCADA systems, SQL databases, text files, workbooks, etc.).

We Map the Data into Intellect, IntelliDynamics(R) Industrial Analytics system

Intellect can access data stored in almost any historical data repository and extract and synchronize your data into unified data sets. These raw data sets are preprocessed and cleaned before creating predictive mathematical models. These models relate operational conditions, materials, and the like to product performance, other process conditions, and throughputs. Much of this is autonomous, meaning that Intellect is a powerful tool designed and built for this purpose using proprietary algorithms over more than 25 years of data science and machine learning algorithms development experience. Intellect will create models that provide key drivers and valuable insights based on past trends and use advanced analytics to estimate current and future expectations of

Design the Optimization

Once the data is mapped in Intellect and the models are developed, a custom industrial prescriptive analytics optimization strategy is designed. Depending on the nature of the solution, it may employ estimates of production, rates, and product properties to determine courses of action, such as setpoints to control the process. These setpoints can be “recommended” to the operator for their consideration or implemented directly to distributed control systems for real-time optimization and control. Process constraints are set to eliminate the risk of overstepping operational boundaries. It can also consider tradeoffs between objectives that deliver an overall optimized recommendation.

Deploy and monitor the results of the analysis

Once the optimization is designed, it can be implemented in the process. Intellect provides a recommendation engine that can deliver results quickly and accurately. The analysis results should be monitored to ensure they are consistent with expectations. This will help to fine-tune future strategies to make sure the optimization works as desired.

Conclusion

Industrial prescriptive analytics is an invaluable tool for organizations seeking to improve their operations. It can quickly identify areas of improvement and suggest the most efficient solution through historical and real-time data-driven insights. These solutions come with little risk as operational constraints are hard coded in, ensuring a reasonable outcome. With proper implementation, this technology can provide competitive advantages over other organizations. IntelliDynamics’ Intellect platform supports businesses in all industries in their journey with industrial prescriptive analytics. Contact us to learn more about how Intellect can help you optimize your operations and deliver greater business value.